UTM Parameters Explained: Track Every Campaign

What are UTM parameters?

UTM parameters are short tags added to the end of a URL, such as utm_source=newsletter, that tell your analytics tool where a visit came from. When someone opens a tagged link, the tool reads the tags and files the visit under the source, medium, and campaign you named. That is how you tell a visitor from last week’s email apart from one who came through a paid campaign, even when both land on the same page.

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, after Urchin, the analytics company Google bought and turned into Google Analytics. The tags are now read by most analytics tools, not only Google’s. They cost nothing, need no code on the page beyond your normal analytics tag, and work with any traffic source that lets you choose the destination URL.

The five UTM parameters, and a few newer ones

Five parameters do almost all the work. Google Analytics recommends always using the first three together.

Google Analytics 4 also reads utm_id (a campaign ID that matches campaign data you upload), utm_source_platform (the buying platform), utm_creative_format, and utm_marketing_tactic. Google’s own help page notes that the last two are not currently reported in Google Analytics properties, so most advertisers can ignore them.

How UTM tracking works

A tagged URL looks like this:

https://example.com/pricing?utm_source=sharklio&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pricing-page-test&utm_content=variant-a

1. The part after ? is the query string. Each tag is a name and a value, joined by = and separated by &.
2. When the page loads, your analytics script reads the tags from the address bar and attaches them to the visit.
3. Everything the visitor does afterwards in that session, such as a sign-up or a purchase, is reported under those values.

Three things follow from this. The page must run your analytics tag, or nothing reads the tags. The tags must still be in the URL when the page loads, so a redirect that drops the query string silently breaks tracking. And the tags describe the visit, not the person: they do not follow a user across devices or into an app installed from a store.

A UTM naming convention that keeps reports clean

UTM tracking fails less often from technical errors than from inconsistent naming. Google’s documentation is explicit that values are case sensitive: Meta and meta show up as two sources, and SpringSale and Spring_Sale as two campaigns. A few rules prevent most of the mess:

• Lowercase everything. It is the simplest rule to follow and to check.
• Pick one separator. Hyphens or underscores, not both. Avoid spaces, which turn into %20 or + in the URL.
• One source per platform. If you call it sharklio once, never call it sharklio.com or shark later.
• One medium per channel type. Decide what cpc, email, and affiliate mean for you and reuse them.
• Campaign names that sort well. A pattern such as 2026-09-pricing-test groups related campaigns and shows their order at a glance.
• No personal data. Never put an email address, phone number, or user ID in a tag. Google’s policies forbid passing personally identifiable information to Google Analytics, and tagged URLs are easy to share and log.

Keep the convention in a shared sheet with one row per live link: the full URL, each tag value, the date, and who created it. It takes a minute per campaign and saves hours of cleaning later.

How utm_medium decides the channel in Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 sorts every visit into a default channel group, such as Paid Search, Email, or Referral. For tagged traffic, the medium does most of the sorting. A few of Google’s published rules:

The channel rules themselves are not case sensitive, but your source and campaign values still are. The practical lesson: choose a medium that lands in the channel you expect. A medium such as rewarded or offerwall matches no rule and ends up in Unassigned. For a campaign you pay per click or per completed action, cpc or cpa sorts it into the paid channels, and your source value then tells you which platform it was.

How to add UTM parameters to a Sharklio campaign

A Sharklio click campaign sends users to your page URL for the view time you choose, from 5 to 60 seconds. A task campaign can require users to open a starting link before they begin. In both cases the user is sent to the URL exactly as you entered it, so any UTM tags you add to that URL reach your page and your analytics tool reads them as usual.

A few details make the setup smoother:

• Tag before you submit. Editing the starting link or page URL of a live campaign sends it back to our team for review, so settle the tags first.
• Keep the URL within 500 characters. That is the limit of the URL field, and it leaves plenty of room for five tags.
• One campaign, one utm_campaign. A campaign has one URL but can target many countries, each with its own bid. Compare countries with your analytics tool’s country report instead of a tag per country.
• Use utm_content for tests. If you run two campaigns that point to two versions of a page, give each a different utm_content value, such as variant-a and variant-b.

A tag set for a Sharklio click campaign could look like this:

https://example.com/signup?utm_source=sharklio&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=2026-09-signup-test&utm_content=variant-a

If you are building your first campaign, Create your first campaign walks through every field, and the landing page checklist covers what to fix on the page before you pay for a single click.

Worked example: from clicks to cost per sign-up

UTM tags turn a traffic source’s own numbers into numbers you can act on. The case below uses made-up figures; what carries over to your campaigns is the way the cost per sign-up falls out of the tags.

From there, ROAS and cost per lead are one step away: divide revenue or leads by the spend on each tagged campaign.

UTM parameters and app store links

UTM tags are built for web pages. When a link goes to an app store, the store does not pass your UTM tags into the app, so web analytics cannot follow the user through the install. The stores have their own options instead:

• Google Play passes a referrer value on the store link to the installed app through the Play Install Referrer API. Google Analytics points Android advertisers to its Play Campaign URL Builder for this, which requires the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK in the app.
• The App Store offers campaign links in App Store Connect. They report product page views, downloads, and usage per campaign, with data shown only once a campaign reaches a small minimum number of users.
• Mobile measurement partners tie installs and in-app events to sources across both stores. What is an MMP? explains how they work.

Sharklio has no MMP integration. For app campaigns, a task that asks for the in-app username as proof lets you find those users in your own data. How to get app installs covers measurement by source in more depth.

Common UTM mistakes

A mistake that often goes unnoticed for months is tagging internal links. A visitor who arrived from search and then clicked a tagged banner on your own site can be relabeled as a campaign visitor, so keep UTM tags for links that bring people in from outside. Another quiet one is a redirect that drops the query string: open the final tagged URL in a private window and check that the tags are still in the address bar after every hop.

The rest are about discipline:

• Mixed spellings. Email, email, and e-mail split one channel into three rows.
• A missing source, medium, or campaign. Use all three on every link, as Google recommends.
• Mediums that match no channel rule, so traffic lands in Unassigned, where nobody looks.
• Tagged URLs posted publicly. Shared links carry your tags into places you did not pay for, so tag the ad or campaign link, not the link on your profile.

UTM checklist before launch

1. Source, medium, and campaign are set, all lowercase, with one separator.
2. The medium sorts into the channel you expect in your analytics tool.
3. The values match your shared naming sheet.
4. The tagged URL loads, and the tags survive every redirect.
5. A test visit appears in your real-time report with the right source and campaign.
6. A conversion, such as a sign-up, is set up as a key event so you can measure more than visits.

Frequently asked questions