UTM Parameters: The Naming Convention and Rules We Use on Every Client Account

What UTM parameters are and what each one does

UTM parameters are name-value pairs added after a question mark in a URL. They do nothing for the visitor. They exist so your analytics tool can record where the click came from. Google Analytics 4 reads nine of them, and three do most of the work.

Google's Google Analytics help page on campaign URLs says you should always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, and that parameters you leave out appear as "(not set)" in reports. It also notes that utm_creative_format and utm_marketing_tactic are not currently reported in Google Analytics properties, so adding them today is extra typing for no visible result.

What a tagged link looks like

https://example.com/ac-tune-up/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring-tuneup-2026&utm_content=hero-button

The first parameter follows a question mark. Each one after that follows an ampersand. If the page URL already has a question mark in it, add the UTM parameters with an ampersand instead.

How GA4 turns UTM parameters into channels

GA4 sorts every tagged visit into a channel, such as Email, Organic Social or Paid Search, mostly by reading utm_medium and utm_source against a fixed set of rules. If your values do not match a rule, the visit lands in Unassigned and disappears from the channel reports you actually read.

This is the part most UTM guides skip, and it is the reason so many small business reports show a large Unassigned slice. The rules below come straight from Google's default channel group rules.

Case: what matters and what does not

Two different rules apply here. Google says UTM parameter values are case sensitive, so utm_source=google and utm_source=Google show as separate sources. The channel definitions themselves are not case sensitive, so "Email" still counts as the Email channel. The practical result: mixed case will not break your channels, but it will split your source and campaign reports into duplicate rows that someone has to add up by hand.

When you need your own channels

The default channel group cannot be edited. If you want Google Business Profile or printed QR codes to be their own channel, GA4 lets you build custom channel groups: a standard property gets two, and Google says they apply to reports retroactively. That is cleaner than bending your medium values to fit the default rules.

Our UTM parameters naming convention

A naming convention is a short set of rules everyone follows when building tagged links, so the same channel always gets the same values. These are the nine rules we apply on every client account.

1. Lowercase everything. No exceptions, because values are case sensitive.
2. Hyphens between words, never spaces. Spaces turn into %20 or plus signs and break filters.
3. utm_medium is a channel type from GA4's list. email, social, cpc, paid-social, referral, sms, display, affiliate. Nothing invented.
4. utm_source is the specific place. facebook, instagram, linkedin, newsletter, chamber-of-commerce.
5. utm_campaign follows one pattern: offer-or-topic plus year or month, such as spring-tuneup-2026 or open-house-2026-11.
6. utm_content tells links apart, such as hero-button versus footer-link, or video-a versus video-b.
7. No personal data. Never put an email address, name or phone number in a UTM value.
8. No UTM parameters on internal links. More on that below.
9. Every tagged link is built from the shared sheet, never typed from memory.

The convention table

This is the table we start from. Adapt the source names to your business, but keep the mediums.

Two rows deserve a note. Tagging the Google Business Profile link with medium organic keeps those visits in Organic Search, while the campaign value lets you filter them out to see how your listing performs on its own. Our guide to Google Business Profile optimization covers the rest of the profile. For QR codes, accept Unassigned or build a custom channel called Offline; do not fake a medium like referral, because it muddies real referral data.

Where UTM parameters do not belong

UTM parameters belong on links you place outside your own website, on channels Google cannot identify by itself. Using them anywhere else does more harm than good.

Internal links on your own site

Never add UTM parameters to a banner, button or menu link that points from one page of your site to another. The visitor already arrived from somewhere, and the tag overwrites that story with your own label. A lead who came from a Google search and then clicked your homepage banner can end up credited to "homepage-banner" instead of search. If you want to know which internal links get clicked, track them as events, not campaigns.

Google Ads clicks

Google Ads has auto-tagging, which adds a click ID (the gclid) to the landing page URL. Google's Google Ads auto-tagging help page says that in GA4 auto-tagging is prioritized over manual tagging, so adding UTM parameters to Google Ads URLs is redundant at best. Leave auto-tagging on and link Google Ads to GA4. Tag Microsoft Ads, Meta and other platforms manually, unless they offer their own tested auto-tagging.

Organic search results and AI answers

You cannot tag the links Google, Bing or an AI assistant shows for your pages, Those visits are identified by their referrer. The work there is visibility, which our small business SEO guide covers.

How to build and test tagged links

Build every tagged link from a template, then click it yourself before it goes out. Most broken UTM parameters we find were never tested once.

This matters most for anything you post on a schedule. If you follow our social media plan for small businesses or a content marketing strategy, every post and email that links to your site is a chance to collect clean source data, or to add another messy row.

1. Open your shared UTM sheet and add a row: date, owner, destination URL, source, medium, campaign, content, final URL.
2. Build the URL with a formula in the sheet, or with Google's free Campaign URL Builder, so nobody types the parameters by hand.
3. Shorten it only if the channel needs a short link, such as print or SMS. Keep the full URL in the sheet.
4. Click the final link on a phone and a desktop. Check that the page loads and the parameters are still in the address bar.
5. Open GA4's Realtime report and confirm the visit shows the source and campaign you expect.

The redirect check

Some redirects strip everything after the question mark. If your link goes through a redirect (an old URL, an http to https hop, a link shortener, a QR code service), check that the UTM parameters survive to the final page. If they do not, point the link straight at the final URL.

The shared sheet

Reading UTM parameters in GA4

Your tagged traffic shows up in GA4's Traffic acquisition report. Switch the primary dimension to Session source / medium or Session campaign to see each value you set, then add key events as a column to see which campaigns produced leads.

Three views answer most questions:

• Session default channel group: the big picture. Check that Unassigned is small. If it is growing, someone is inventing mediums.
• Session source / medium: the detail. Look for duplicates like facebook / social and Facebook / Social, which means the convention is slipping.
• Session campaign: results by promotion. This is where utm_campaign pays off, because you can compare the spring email against the fall one.

Clicks are not the finish line

A UTM tag tells you where a visit came from. It does not tell you whether that person called, booked or bought. Mark your real actions as key events, and track phone calls as well as forms. Our own platform, UnifiedIQ, tracks every call and form back to its source, which is how a campaign value in a link becomes a lead count in a monthly report. If you want that wired into your own stack, our analytics and reporting team sets up the tagging, key events and call tracking together.

The payoff is specific. For Aces Airboat Tours we counted 369 booking-button clicks in the first two months, which is the kind of number that settles debates about what is working. You can see the rest of our measurement work on the analytics and growth hub.

A worked example: one promotion, every link tagged

Here is how we would tag a single promotion across channels for a hypothetical HVAC company running a fall tune-up offer. The campaign value stays the same everywhere, so GA4 can show the whole promotion in one row and then split it by source.

At the end of the month the owner can answer real questions. Did the email or the text drive more bookings? Did the video ad beat the photo? Was the door hanger worth printing? Without the tags, most of this traffic would have shown up as Direct or Unassigned and the answers would be guesses.

Planning which channels a promotion runs on in the first place is a strategy question; our guide to building a digital marketing strategy covers that step.

UTM parameters mistakes that break your reports

The same handful of mistakes cause most of the messy data we inherit. Each one is easy to prevent with the sheet and the rules above.

A five-minute monthly check

Once a month, open Session source / medium for the last 30 days and sort alphabetically. Duplicates, capital letters and odd mediums jump out. Fix the source link, update the sheet, and note the date so the next report explains the change. For paid social specifically, our paid social team builds the tagging into every ad set from day one, and you can ask us to review your current setup.

UTM parameters questions, answered