Set up UTM Tags

Business Benefits

Understand which online marketing efforts lead to conversions.


Use lowercase when naming your parameters, whenever possible.

Email, email, and eMail, are considered three different values in Google Analytics.

utm_source and utm_medium, always need to be lowercase.

Use dashes instead of white spaces in your parameters.

Do not use punctuation or special characters when naming UTM parameters.

Follow best practices when creating UTM values.

  • utm_source: Use the name of the platform, tool, or email list as the value. For example, Facebook, Google, or newsletter.
  • utm_medium: Follow widely used values like organic, CPC, or PPC whenever possible, and refrain from passing custom values.
  • utm_campaign: Use the name of the internal campaign of your marketing or advertisement platform, or a value that identifies the product, category, event, or higher-level marketing or promotional objective as your utm_campaign value.
  • utm_term: Use a value that clearly identifies the specific entity within the medium, your promotion or marketing activity responsible for driving traffic to your website, such as a specific email, ad in an ad group, post on social media, or title of a blog post.
  • utm_content: Always fill this in. Although an optional field, utm_content can be used to send any information about a click to Google Analytics, such as links within the same ad, links within a blog post, CTA buttons within an email, or variations of an A/B test.

Use utm_content to send any information about a click not covered by other parameters.

Use the format key1--value-01_key2--value--02... to send all other information about a click through utm_content. Key identifies the type of information being sent and is separated from the value with two dashes, with key-value pairs being separated by underscores.

For example, your utm_content value might look like this:

audience--tof_variation-a_linktype--image-red-box

Do not use UTMs on internal links like banners, sliders, or on blog posts.

This causes the current session to end and a new session attributed to the source or medium used on the internal link to start. This means that any subsequent user action, goal completion, or transaction will be attributed to the internal source, instead of the one that actually brought the user to the site.

Do not include personal information like someone’s name, email address, or telephone number in UTM parameters.

These parameters are visible to other users, and collecting personal data in Google Analytics is against their terms of service.

Use URL shorteners like bit.ly for cleaner URLs when sharing links containing UTM parameters.

Use tools like Fresh URL to hide UTM parameters from browser address bars after they’re recorded by Google Analytics.

Use the Google URL Builder to add UTM parameters to individual URLs, or tools like UTM.io to add UTM parameters to multiple URLs.

This makes it easier to document your UTM strategy, share it with your team, and automate the process of adding UTM parameters to your URLs.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T12:15:43Z

1 Like

I often see that utm_campaign is also used to send additional information regarding the type of the campaign. For example: when a newsletter campaign is a retargeting campaign the utm_campaign value is: newsletter-nov_campaign-type–retargeting.

Thanks @David Stöckli for the additional information.

Absolutely. The possibilities are limitless. However you have to be careful to stay organized otherwise things can get messy. My advice is to keep things simple and only add data you absolutely know you will use. If you add lots, it can get overwhelming and confusing pretty quickly.