UTM Builder

Why consistency matters more than the tags themselves

Analytics treats Instagram, instagram and IG as three separate sources, so one campaign tagged three ways by three people becomes three rows that each look too small to matter. The tool that fixes this is not a builder, it is a decision written down somewhere the whole team can see: lowercase everything, underscores rather than spaces, and one agreed word per source.

What goes in each field

Source is where the click came from, meaning the platform or the publication. Medium is the type of traffic, so cpc for paid search, paid_social for boosted posts, email for a newsletter. Campaign is the thing you are running, and it is worth putting a date in it because you will run a Diwali campaign again next year.

Term and content are optional and mostly matter for paid search keywords and for telling two creatives apart. Skipping them is fine. Inventing a fourth convention for them across three people is not.

Two mistakes that cost real data

Tagging internal links is the first. A UTM on a link between two pages of your own site restarts the session and reattributes the visit, so a customer who arrived from Google and clicked a tagged banner shows up as coming from your own banner. Only tag links that arrive from somewhere else.

The second is tagging a Google Ads link by hand while auto-tagging is switched on. The two fight, and you lose the keyword-level detail auto-tagging gives you. Leave Google Ads alone and use this for everything else.