What are UTM parameters?
UTM parameters (Urchin Tracking Module, from Google's acquisition of Urchin Software in 2005) are tags added to URLs that tell analytics platforms where your traffic came from. When someone clicks a link with UTM parameters, those parameters are sent to your analytics platform and recorded against the session, letting you see exactly which campaign, channel, and creative drove each visit and conversion.
Without UTM parameters, Google Analytics shows traffic from email campaigns as "direct" (because email clients do not send referrer headers), making it impossible to distinguish between organic visitors, email subscribers, and newsletter clicks. UTM parameters solve this attribution problem completely.
The five UTM parameters
utm_source identifies the referring platform or publication: google, newsletter, twitter, instagram, partner-site. utm_medium identifies the marketing channel type: cpc (cost per click/paid search), email, social, organic, referral, banner, affiliate, video. utm_campaign identifies the specific campaign: spring-sale-2024, product-launch-june, weekly-newsletter. utm_term is for paid search keywords: running+shoes, best+seo+tools. utm_content distinguishes between multiple links in the same campaign, typically for A/B testing: blue-cta-button, hero-image-v2, top-nav-link.
Source, medium, and campaign are required for meaningful tracking. Term and content are optional and used for more granular analysis.
Building your first UTM URL
Enter the landing page URL in the base URL field — this must be the exact URL of the page you want to send traffic to. Fill in the source (where the link will appear), medium (the channel type), and campaign (the campaign name). Click "Use this number" to generate the tagged URL and save it to history. Copy the URL and use it as the link destination in your email, ad, or social post.
Naming conventions — the most important decision
UTM parameter values are case-sensitive in most analytics platforms — "Email" and "email" appear as two separate sources. Establish a naming convention before your first campaign and document it. Recommended: all lowercase, hyphens instead of spaces, consistent source names (always "newsletter" not sometimes "email-newsletter"), consistent medium taxonomy. The auto-lowercase option enforces this automatically.
The history panel
The "Save to history" button logs every generated URL with a timestamp to the history panel (stored in your browser). Save every UTM URL you generate so you have a reference for what parameters were used for each campaign. The "Copy all" button copies the complete history as a list for documentation. This is particularly useful at campaign reporting time when you need to verify which specific URLs were used.