UTM builder.

Without UTM tags, a visitor arriving from your Instagram bio, your newsletter and a QR code on a flyer all look roughly the same in Analytics — often lumped together as direct traffic, which is where attribution goes to die. Tag the links and each source reports separately, so you find out which channel is worth the effort before you spend another month on the wrong one.

Three parameters are required for Analytics to attribute anything: source (where the click came from), medium (what kind of channel), and campaign (which effort it belongs to). Content and term are optional and useful when you are testing two versions of the same link.

The values are lowercased and hyphenated automatically, which matters more than it sounds. UTM values are case-sensitive: "Facebook" and "facebook" become two separate sources in your reports, and by the time you notice, your data is already split across both.

Worth knowing

• Agree on a naming convention and write it down. Consistency is worth more than cleverness here.
• Never put UTM tags on internal links — they overwrite the original source and destroy your attribution.
• For print and QR codes, use a short redirect URL that carries the tags. Nobody types a tagged link.