UTM naming conventions that still make sense a year later
The hard part of UTM tagging is not building the link. It is building the four hundredth link the same way you built the first, especially when three other people are also building links.
The core problem in one line: analytics treats
Facebook, facebook and
FB as three different sources. Do that for a quarter and your channel
report is fiction — the same traffic split across rows that never add up.
The six rules
1. Lowercase, always
UTM values are case-sensitive in most analytics tools. There is no upside to capital letters
and a permanent downside. Newsletter →
newsletter.
2. Hyphens instead of spaces
A space becomes %20 in a URL, which makes the link ugly and the report worse.
Hyphens read better than underscores in URLs. spring sale →
spring-sale.
3. No accented characters
Accents get percent-encoded and turn into unreadable strings in the report.
promoção → promocao. This matters
disproportionately for anyone tagging campaigns in Portuguese, Spanish or French.
4. Standard values in utm_medium
This field drives your channel grouping. Invented values land in "other". Stick to the recognised list.
5. Put the date in the campaign name
spring-sale is ambiguous the second year you run it.
spring-sale-2026 is not. Cheap insurance.
6. Never tag internal links
Tagging a link on your own site restarts the visitor's session and overwrites the original source. The person who arrived from your newsletter is now recorded as arriving from your own homepage, and the newsletter loses credit for the conversion. Only tag links that live somewhere else.
A template worth stealing
utm_source = the specific place (newsletter, facebook, partner-name)
utm_medium = the channel type (email, cpc, social, referral)
utm_campaign = what-it-is-year (spring-sale-2026, webinar-march-2026)
utm_content = which-creative (hero-cta, footer-link, variant-b)Write it down before you need it
A convention that lives in one person's head is not a convention. Put it in a shared document with three worked examples and a list of approved source and medium values. The moment a second person builds a link, that document is the only thing standing between you and a report you cannot trust.
The builder on this site enforces rules 1 to 4 automatically and warns you when your medium is not a standard value — which catches most of what goes wrong before it reaches your analytics.
Last reviewed 2026-08-13