What UTMs actually are
UTM parameters are query string additions to URLs that tell your analytics platform where a visitor came from. The five parameters are: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, and utm_term. Of these, the first three are the ones you actually need to be consistent about.
The most common mistakes
Google Analytics treats 'Email', 'email', and 'EMAIL' as three separate sources. The fix is embarrassingly simple: define your naming conventions before you send your first tracked link, write them down somewhere, and enforce them.
“Establish your UTM naming conventions before you send a single tracked link. Retrofitting them later means either losing historical comparability or tedious data cleaning.”
Naming conventions that scale
For teams managing more than a handful of campaigns simultaneously, a naming convention document that people actually use is the difference between analytics you can rely on and analytics you can only gesture at.
Short links and UTM hygiene
A URL with five UTM parameters can easily be 200+ characters long. When these URLs get shared in emails, messages, tweets, or printed materials, line-wrapping breaks the URL at arbitrary points. Short links solve all of these problems simultaneously.
Reading the data correctly
UTM data tells you where traffic came from. It does not, by itself, tell you what that traffic is worth. UTM data needs to be read alongside conversion and engagement metrics to mean anything.
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