UTM tags for people who aren't marketers

Open the campaign report on almost any site that's been running for a year and you'll find something like this: newsletter, Newsletter, email, mail, nl, and one row called test. All the same thing, split five ways, because whoever tagged the links (often past you) made the words up on the spot each time.

UTM tags are easy. Keeping them consistent is the whole job. This is a system small enough to remember, written for people who run a website rather than a marketing department.

What the five tags are for

A UTM tag is a parameter on a link. When someone clicks it, your analytics tool reads the tags off the address and files the visit under them. There are five that every tool understands:

Source matters most. Medium and campaign are worth adding every time. Content is optional and more useful than it looks: it's the only way to tell two links in the same newsletter apart. Term you can ignore unless you buy search ads.

Rule 1: lowercase, always

Most analytics tools treat Newsletter and newsletter as two different sources. GA4 does, and so does a spreadsheet pivot table. Write everything in lowercase and you never have to think about it again.

While you're at it, use hyphens instead of spaces. A space in a URL turns into %20 or a plus sign depending on who built the link, and then you have a third spelling.

Rule 2: take mediums from a short list

Sources can be anything, because there are endless places a link can live. Medium should come from a list of about six words and nothing else. That's where most of the mess comes from, and it matters more than it looks: Google Analytics sorts visits into channels like Email and Organic Social by reading utm_medium (and sometimes utm_source), and a word it doesn't recognise goes to Unassigned.

Words like newsletter, podcast or print land in Unassigned. You can still filter by them, so it's not a disaster, but there's no reason to pick a fight with the channel report. For podcasts, GA has an Audio channel that matches utm_medium=audio. QR codes have no channel at all; qr works fine as long as you accept that it lands in Unassigned.

Rule 3: never tag your own links

UTM tags are for links that point at your site from somewhere else. Put one on a banner on your own homepage and every visitor who clicks it gets relabelled: someone who arrived from Google now looks like they came from homepage-banner, and depending on the tool, either the rest of their visit or whatever they do next is credited to your own banner.

If you want to know which internal links get clicked, look at which pages people go to next. That's what the pages report is for.

Links you can copy

Swap example.com for your own domain. Every one of these follows the three rules above.

Two notes. Links on other websites already send a referrer, so tagging them is optional; do it when you want to tell two links on the same site apart. And nobody types a UTM tag they heard on a podcast. Give the show a short address like example.com/podcast that redirects to the tagged link.

Things that quietly break tags

• Redirects that drop the query string. Click your own tagged link and look at the address bar after it lands. If the tags are gone, so is your data.
• Tags after a #. In example.com/#pricing?utm_source=x the tags are part of the fragment, which most tools never read. Put them before it: example.com/?utm_source=x#pricing.
• Tagged links that travel. When someone copies the link from your X post into a group chat, the visit still says utm_source=x. You can't prevent it, and it's one more reason not to over-read small differences.
• Tagged addresses in search results. Make sure your pages have a canonical tag, so search engines treat example.com/?utm_source=x as the same page as example.com/.

Keep a list

The system only works if your next link uses the same words as your last one. A note with three columns is enough: the date, where the link lives, and the tags. Before you make a new link, look at the list and reuse a source if one fits.

That's all of it. Lowercase, six mediums, nothing internal, and a list. It takes a minute per link and saves you an afternoon of cleaning up a year from now.

Lomen reads all five tags from the link, with nothing to set up, and shows your campaigns on the dashboard next to everything else. If you tag with utm_content, Lomen AI can split the day your newsletter went out by link, so you can see which of the two did the work.