UTM parameters

What it means

UTM parameters are additions to a link that label the source, medium and campaign in analytics. They reveal where a visitor came from when the address alone would not.

Without them e-mail, paid advertising and a partner link collapse into one bucket. Evaluating campaigns then becomes guesswork about which produced the orders.

UTM parameters track nobody on their own; they are just text in an address. The data in them is processed by an analytics tool, however, and on a website that tool usually needs cookie consent. When a visitor declines, the tag never shows up in the reports, so campaign figures are always somewhat lower than reality.

How it works in practice

A simple agreed format works: source, medium, campaign name and optionally content. Consistency matters more than elegance: mixed capitalisation splits one campaign into three.

It is worth tagging links in newsletters, in a salesperson’s signature and in QR codes on print. Those channels otherwise stay invisible.

When working with partners or influencers, each gets their own source value. Orders can then be attributed to a specific partner, commissions checked against sales, and the ROAS of each campaign worked out, that is, whether the revenue it brought exceeded what it cost.

What to watch out for

Do not tag internal links between your own pages: they overwrite the original source and analytics will show the customer as having arrived on their own.

Personal data must never go into a parameter, such as the e-mail address of a newsletter recipient. The address then ends up stored in analytics, possibly with a third party, which is processing without a legal basis under GDPR and hard to purge from historical data.