UTM Naming Convention: How to Set One Up for Your Team
UTM tags tell your analytics tool where traffic came from. Here is how to agree one naming standard across a team, and which mistakes corrupt the data.
rabbitclip teamPublished: 7 min read
Short answer
UTM tags are short labels added to the end of a link that tell your analytics tool which source, which medium and which campaign a visitor came from. Writing one tag is easy. Getting a team, an agency and an ad manager to write the same tag in the same way is the hard part. A naming convention is therefore a short list of writing rules: which values are allowed, which letter case to use, who creates the links and where they are recorded.
The trouble usually starts small. One person writes Facebook, another writes facebook, a third writes fb. The analytics tool counts these as three different sources, and the traffic from one channel is spread across three rows of the report. Nobody has done anything obviously wrong, yet the total has disappeared from view.
This article describes a standard that a small or mid-sized team can keep on a single page. It needs no technical knowledge. It needs a handful of decisions and a place where everyone can see them written down.
What are UTM parameters and which ones are required?
There are five standard parameters: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content. The first three matter in practice. The source says where the traffic came from, such as a newsletter, a social network or a partner site. The medium says what kind of traffic it is, such as email, paid social, paid search or a banner. The campaign says which piece of work the traffic belongs to.
Term and content are optional. Term is usually used for the keyword in paid search, and content is used to tell apart variants of an image or a line of copy within one campaign. In a team's first year it is healthier to use these two only where you genuinely need the distinction than to add all five parameters to every link.
How do you set up a naming convention inside a team?
A convention starts with three decisions: letter case, separator and the list of allowed values. Choose lower case throughout, because analytics tools generally treat upper and lower case as different values. Choose either a hyphen or an underscore and use only that one. Avoid accented characters, spaces and special symbols, since they risk breaking the link.
The third decision is the pattern for campaign names. A useful pattern carries enough information for anyone reading it to recognise the campaign, and nothing more. One example is period, goal and topic, in that order. Imagine a spa group running a spring package offer: the period, goal and topic read together, and someone looking at the report six months later does not have to ask what the name means.
- Everything in lower case, with a hyphen as the only separator
- No accented characters, spaces or special symbols
- Campaign name built as period, goal and topic, in that order
- A closed list of values for source and medium
- Adding a new value needs the approval of one named person
How should you choose source and medium values?
Use a closed list for source and medium rather than free typing. The source list normally consists of the places where the team really does receive traffic, and it rarely goes beyond fifteen values. The medium list is shorter still: email, paid social, paid search, organic social, partner and banner are often enough.
It helps to keep this list consistent with the default channel groups in your analytics tool. The tool assigns traffic to channels by looking at the source and medium together, so if you invent medium names of your own, traffic may not appear in the channel you expected. Check in the help documentation of the tool you use which medium names fall into which group.
Who should own the standard, and how is it kept intact?
The standard lives in one shared spreadsheet. Three tabs are enough: allowed values, campaign records and generated links. A campaign record is opened before any link is made, which stops the same campaign from receiving a second name.
Building links from the sheet or with a link builder, rather than typing them by hand, lowers the room for error. The free UTM generator on this site can serve that purpose. Giving one person care of the sheet prevents the standard from drifting as the team grows; in a company this might be a marketing lead, and on the agency side an account manager.
If you work with outside parties, give them the standard in writing as well. Links prepared by an agency, a freelancer or a partner must follow the same pattern, otherwise the messiest records will be the ones that arrive from outside.
What are the most common UTM mistakes?
The most common mistake is inconsistent spelling: a mix of upper and lower case or an abbreviation for the same source. The second is adding UTM tags to internal links on your own site. When a visitor clicks a banner on your site and passes through a tagged internal link, the true source of the session can be overwritten and the real channel disappears from the report. Other methods, such as events, exist for tracking internal clicks.
The third mistake is packing information into the campaign name. A name that holds the date, budget, audience, image number and owner becomes unreadable. The fourth is shortening a link without testing the tag. Before going live, open each link once and check that it shows up in the real-time view of your analytics tool.
- Several spellings of one source (Facebook, facebook, fb)
- Using UTM tags on links inside your own site
- Cramming too much into the campaign name
- Not testing the link before launch
- Typing links by hand with no record kept
When are UTM tags not needed, or the wrong choice?
Moving between pages on your own site needs no UTM tag, and adding one does harm. Organic search traffic should not be tagged either; search engines already report the source. A link is tagged only when you place it somewhere outside your site that you control, such as a newsletter, an advert, a post or a partner page.
For paid search, the platform's automatic tagging is often sufficient and carries the detail from inside the platform more accurately than a UTM tag does. Manual UTM tags make sense only when you need to pass the information on to another tool. If you set up both, confirm in the tool settings which one takes priority.
A naming convention is written once but only produces value when everyone uses it. A short list of values, one register of campaigns and one method of building links are usually enough for a team to read its reports in the same language. If you would like to see how scattered your current tags are, we can look at them together in a discovery call with rabbitclip.
FAQ
Do UTM tags affect SEO?
They do not directly affect rankings, but they can cause the same page to circulate under different addresses. If the canonical tag on the page is set correctly, search engines treat these addresses as a single page. Verify this on your own site.
Are UTM parameters case sensitive?
Analytics tools generally are, and they count Instagram and instagram as separate sources. That is why the standard writes every value in lower case.
Do I need to add all five parameters to every link?
No. Source, medium and campaign are enough for most work. Add term and content only when you need to tell variants apart inside one campaign.
How do I tidy up existing messy tags?
First list the different spellings that appear in the last few months of reports and build the allowed-value list from them. You cannot correct old data; you start the standard from now and merge the old spellings by hand in your reports.
