UTM Builder

Without UTM tags, most of your traffic arrives labelled “direct” and you have no idea which newsletter, post or ad actually sent it. Five parameters appended to a URL fix that, and getting them consistent is more important than getting them clever.

Building a tagged URL

1. Paste the destination URL you want people to land on.
2. Set utm_source — where the traffic comes from, such as newsletter or linkedin.
3. Set utm_medium — the channel type: email, cpc, social.
4. Set utm_campaign — the specific initiative, like spring-launch.
5. Copy the finished URL and use it in that placement only.

What each parameter is for

• utm_source — the specific origin. A publication, a platform, a partner. Answer: who sent them?
• utm_medium — the broad channel category. Answer: what kind of marketing was it?
• utm_campaign — the initiative these links belong to. Answer: which effort was this part of?
• utm_term — the paid keyword, mostly a legacy of search advertising.
• utm_content — which variant of the creative. Use it to tell two buttons in the same email apart.

Consistency is the whole game

UTM values are case-sensitive and are matched as literal strings. Facebook, facebook and FaceBook will appear as three separate sources in your reports, splitting the data for no reason.

Pick a convention on day one — lowercase throughout, hyphens rather than spaces or underscores — write it down somewhere your whole team can see, and stick to it. A shared spreadsheet of every campaign URL your organisation has built is unglamorous and saves an enormous amount of confusion later.

Mistakes worth avoiding

• Tagging internal links between your own pages. It wipes out the original attribution.
• Inventing a new medium for every campaign instead of reusing a small fixed set.
• Leaving spaces in values, which get encoded as %20 and look broken.
• Putting anything private or personally identifiable in a UTM value — they are public and get shared.
• Forgetting that the tagged URL is what people will see and copy.

UTM questions