UTM Campaign Builder

What each parameter is for

The three required parameters answer three different questions, and keeping them straight is most of what makes campaign reporting usable:

• Source — where the click came from. The specific property: google, linkedin, newsletter.
• Medium — how it got there. The channel type: cpc, email, social, referral.
• Campaign — which push it belongs to. The initiative: spring_launch.

Term and content are optional. Term traditionally carries a paid keyword, and content distinguishes two variants of the same campaign — two creatives, or the top and bottom link in one email.

Why capitalisation breaks reports

UTM values are case-sensitive, so Google and google become two separate rows in your analytics. One inconsistent link, repeated across a campaign, quietly splits a channel in half and makes every comparison wrong. The fix is a convention rather than a tool: lowercase everything, use underscores rather than spaces, and keep a shared list of approved source and medium values so two people tagging the same channel produce identical strings.

Where to keep your tagging convention

A UTM scheme only survives if it lives somewhere other than one person’s memory. Keep a short shared document listing the exact source and medium values your team is allowed to use, and build every link from this tool rather than by editing an old URL by hand. Hand-edited links are where stray capitals, trailing spaces and duplicated campaign names come from, and each one costs you a row in the report that should have been merged with another.

Tagging internal links is the other common mistake. A UTM on a link between two of your own pages restarts the session attribution and overwrites the original source, so the channel that actually won the visit disappears from the report.