Campaign tags only help if everyone writes them the same way. A short convention, and a way to clean up the past.
Why tags matter
UTM tags are the labels you add to a link, such as utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=spring_sale. They are how analytics and attribution tools know where a visit came from when the link is clicked. If the labels are inconsistent, the same channel shows up under several names and the totals are wrong.
A convention that works for most teams
- utm_source is the site or platform:
google,facebook,instagram,bing,newsletter,partner_name. - utm_medium is the type of traffic, from a short fixed list:
cpc,paid_social,display,video,email,affiliate,referral,sms. - utm_campaign is the campaign name: lower case, underscores, no spaces, the same name as in the ad platform where possible.
- utm_content tells ads or links apart inside a campaign:
video_a,carousel_b,header_link. - utm_term is the keyword or audience, when it helps.
Rules of thumb: always lower case, never spaces, never the same word for source and medium, and write the list down where the whole team can find it.
Don’t tag your own site
Links between pages of your own website should never carry UTM tags. They overwrite the real source of the visit and make the campaign look like it came from your own home page.
Ad clicks carry their own IDs
Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and Meta add their own click IDs (gclid, msclkid, fbclid) to ad links. Keep auto-tagging on: those IDs let you send conversions back to the platform later, even when UTM tags are missing.
Fixing the past
Most teams inherit years of inconsistent tags. Renaming them in the data destroys the record of what was actually used. A better approach is to keep the original tags and apply clean-up rules when reports are read, so a new rule fixes all of history at once and can be changed later. In Metric Sensei these are called tag rules: every admin can edit them, and the original values are always one click away.