Marketing3 min read
How to Create UTM Tracking Links for Free
UTM parameters tell your analytics where a visitor came from. They are easy to add and easy to get inconsistently wrong. Here is how to do it properly.
KLYRO TeamPublished
A UTM parameter is a label bolted onto the end of a URL. When somebody clicks the link, your analytics reads the label and files the visit under it.
That is the whole idea. The complication is that the labels are free text, so two people tagging the same campaign will produce two different sets of numbers.
What each parameter is for
| Parameter | Answers | Example |
|---|---|---|
| utm_source | Where the visit came from | newsletter, linkedin, partner-site |
| utm_medium | What kind of channel it was | email, social, cpc, qr |
| utm_campaign | Which campaign it belongs to | spring-launch |
| utm_content | Which version of the link, when there are several | header-button, footer-link |
| utm_term | The paid search keyword, if any | office chairs |
How to build one
Start with the page you want people to land on
The real destination, not a shortener and not a redirect. Parameters added to a link that then redirects can be dropped along the way.
Fill in source, medium and campaign
These three are what your reports group by. Keep them lowercase and use hyphens instead of spaces.
Add content only if you need to compare
Two links in the same email, going to the same page, are the case this exists for.
Copy the finished URL
It is encoded as you type, so anything you enter is safe to paste anywhere a link goes.
Naming conventions are the whole game
Analytics tools treat Email, email and e-mail as three different mediums. Six months of that and your report is unreadable.
Agree three rules before anyone tags anything:
- Always lowercase.
- Hyphens instead of spaces or underscores.
- A fixed list of mediums that nobody adds to without asking.
email,social,cpc,referral,qrcovers most businesses.
Common mistakes
- Inconsistent capitalisation. The single most common cause of a messy report.
- Putting the campaign name in the source. Source is where they came from. Campaign is why. Mixing them makes both useless.
- Tagging a link that redirects. Some redirects drop query parameters. Point the tagged link straight at its destination.
- Leaving UTM parameters on a page you then share elsewhere. They travel, and the second audience gets attributed to the first.
- Tagging so much that nothing is comparable. Five campaigns you can compare beats fifty you cannot.
Questions
- Do UTM parameters affect SEO?
- Not if your pages have a canonical tag pointing at the clean address, which is the normal setup. That is what tells search engines the tagged URL and the plain one are the same page.
- Can I use them on a QR code?
- Yes, and you should — otherwise print traffic is invisible. Build the tagged link first, then turn it into a QR code with
utm_medium=qr. - Are they case sensitive?
- The values are, in most analytics tools. That is exactly why the lowercase rule matters.