UTM link builder

The five parameters, and which you actually need

Three of the five do nearly all the work. The other two are worth using only when you have a specific question they answer.

• utm_source — where the click came from: linkedin, newsletter, partner-site
• utm_medium — the kind of channel: social, email, cpc
• utm_campaign — the thing it belongs to: spring-launch, black-friday
• utm_content — which specific post or variant, when you are comparing two
• utm_term — the paid keyword; ignore it unless you are running search ads

Consistency matters more than cleverness

The most common way UTM tagging fails is not using too few parameters, it is using them inconsistently. If half your links say utm_source=LinkedIn and the other half say linkedin, your analytics will report two separate sources and both will look half as effective as the channel really is. Pick a convention — lowercase, hyphens instead of spaces, a fixed vocabulary for medium — and write it down somewhere the whole team can see. This tool lowercases and hyphenates by default for exactly that reason.

Name campaigns so they still mean something in a year

Campaign names have a habit of being written for the person creating them on the day. "new-post" is meaningless three months later; "2026-03-spring-launch" is obvious forever. A date prefix costs nothing and makes a year of reporting sortable.

A word on link shorteners and clean links

Tagged URLs are ugly, and on some networks a visibly parameterised link reduces clicks. A shortener solves the appearance problem while keeping the tags intact behind the redirect. What you should not do is drop the tags to make the link look nicer — an untagged link is one you cannot learn anything from, which is the whole reason you were tagging.