UTM Best Practice

Introduction

UTM parameters are simply tags that you add to a URL. When someone clicks on a URL with UTM parameters, those tags are sent back to your Google Analytics account for tracking.

Example of a standard URL: booking.zerolatencyvr.com/book-now/north-melbourne/

The same URL with UTM parameters added:

https://booking.zerolatencyvr.com/book-now/north-melbourne/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=Black+Friday&utm_content=Video+Portrait+15+sec

There are five basic UTM parameters: 

1. utm_source – Tracks the domain name or platform that’s sending the traffic eg. Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Email
2. utm_medium – Tracks the medium dimension the visitor used to land on your site eg. cpc, ppc, paid
3. utm_campaign – Tracks the name of your marketing push across channels and platforms eg. Christmas, Remarketing, Black Friday or Competitors
4. utm_content – Tracks which of your content assets, part of the text or call-to-action placement sent the traffic eg. Video Version 1, Learn More copy, Book Now button
5. utm_term – generally used to track which paid search keywords sent the traffic or it can ‌differentiate social ad headlines, email subject lines etc

On top of the five main ones, you can also use custom parameters and expand the campaign dimensions you report on.

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On this page:

  Why should I use UTMs?

  Where will I see the Benefit?

  Why do I need to follow Best Practices?

  Best practice for Social Media ads

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Why should I use UTMs?

Without UTM parameters, you would lack attribution data for clicks from a long list of traffic sources, and you would lack campaign nuances for almost all of your traffic sources.

Examples:

• Which one of your concurrent campaigns was behind the most valuable clicks?
• Which specific post or ad version within your campaign initiated the sessions with high value of revenue generated?
• Which email list had a higher click rate?
• Which button or CTA was overlooked?
• Which subject line leads to high website engagement?
• Which advertising channel contributed the most in driving purchases on the site? 

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Where will I see the Benefit?

The benefits will be evident only in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). With the new GTM set up including Cross Domain Tracking, the use of UTMs and switching to GA4, GA4 will be able to attribute purchases and events back to a traffic source. Therefore, if the setup is implemented correctly, a final event (purchase) should be broken down by the referring channel in your GA4 reporting.

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Why do I need to follow Best Practices?

Google will group traffic using the utm parameters added to the URL based on GA4’s default settings. If the UTM parameters do not follow GA4’s default UTM standards, traffic may get attributed to the incorrect channel. As an example, traffic can be attributed to Organic Social instead of Paid Social traffic if GA4’s UTM standards aren’t adhered to. Whilst you can create your own custom channel groupings, the default channel groupings cannot be adjusted currently. 

The official documentation can be found here: [GA4] Default channel group - Analytics Help

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Best practice for Social Media ads

Official Google Source Categories

Source matches regex ^(Official Google Source Categories for Social channels)$ - use the filter on the table below to check if your social channel is listed. ie. If manually creating a UTM, the utm_source parameter for social channels can be Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest. The social channel name can be in lower or proper casing and they should still work. The official list of sources can be found here. 

The utm_medium parameter for social channel should match regex ^(cpc|ppc|paid.*)$ - we recommend using ‘paid or ‘paid_social’ vs ‘cpc’.

If you want to use the inbuilt URL parameter builder in the Facebook Ads platform, then we recommend using the following parameters with Campaign source and Campaign medium being the most important. You can choose to use other dynamic elements for the other parameters, including custom additions.

Site Source Name pulls in four values Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and AudienceNetwork.

We recommend that you start by manually setting the source to Facebook (to fit the default Paid Social channel) and add a custom parameter for Placement to differentiate. Once you're confident about the tracking, then shift to dynamic parameters for the source, like the examples below.

Best practice for Google ads:

If you’ve set up the integration between Analytics and your Google Ad account as part of the GTM Configuration Project, then you ideally want to use the auto-tagging feature that is implemented with each integration. Auto-tagging provides you with platform-specific dimensions and with more dimensions than you get with manual tagging.

URLs that are auto-tagged with Google Ads parameters include the gclid parameter. Auto-tagging provides the following dimensions at event, session, and first user scopes:

• Google Ads campaign
• Google Ads account name
• Google Ads ad group name
• Google Ads keyword text
• Google Ads query
• Google Ads ad network type
• Google Ads ad group ID
• Google Ads customer ID

Please refer to this article for more information on auto vs manual tagging for Google Ads - Benefits of Google Ads auto-tagging - Analytics Help

General rules for Google Default Channel Group:

Use the below as a reference for manual tagging requirements. There are additional channel groupings which can be found in this link. The below table only focuses on the key paid media channels. Should you need to use manual tagging, we recommend using Google’s URL builder - Campaign URL Builder.

Channel	Source	And/Or	Medium	Examples
Paid Social	Match a regex list of search sites	AND	Matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$	Source = facebook, fb, ig, pinterest, tiktok, snapchat AND Medium = cpc, cpv, ppc, retargeting, paid, paid_social,paid_facebook
Organic Social	Matches a regex list of search sites	AND	Medium is one of (“social”, “social-network”, “social-media”, “sm”, “social network”, “social media”)	Source = facebook, ig, pinterest, tiktok, snapchat AND  Medium = “social”, “social-network”, “social-media”, “sm”, “social network”, “social media”
PaidSearch	URLs that are auto-tagged with GoogleAds However, if done manually:  Source matches a list of search sites	OR	Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$	Source = “google”, “bing”, “yahoo”, “duckduckgo” OR  Medium = “cpc”, “ppc”, “retargeting”, “paid”, “paid_search”
Email	Source = email, e-mail,e_mail or e mail	OR	Medium = email, e-mail, e_mail ore mail	utm_source=klaviyo&utm_medium=email  OR utm_source=email&utm_medium= abandoned_cart_series
SMS	Anything	N/A	Medium exactly matches sms	utm_source=klaviyo&utm_medium=sms OR utm_source=sfcc&utm_medium=sms

For a detailed explanation of how Regular Expressions (Regex) works, you can watch the video below:

Knowing Regular Expressions is neither required nor advised in this case. The above resource is only being provided in case you would like to get a deeper understanding of how things work. 

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