Templating seasonal campaigns so you stop rebuilding them

Recurring campaigns are the easiest thing to systemise

Most teams run a handful of predictable pushes: a seasonal sale, a year-end promotion, a back-to-work campaign, a renewal drive. Each time, someone rebuilds the link set from memory, invents slightly different UTM values, and the year-over-year comparison quietly becomes impossible. A template fixes both problems at once.

What belongs in the template

The list of surfaces and their UTM triples, the slug pattern, the destination placeholders, and the owner of each. Not the destinations themselves — those change — and not the dates. Think of it as the shape of the campaign, filled in each time with this year's specifics.

Version the campaign name, keep everything else stable

utm_campaign carries the year: winter-sale-2026. Source and medium do not change at all between years. utm_content values stay identical where the placement is the same. That is what makes the comparison work: only one dimension moved, so a difference in results is about the campaign rather than the taxonomy.

Slug patterns that do not collide

A short, memorable slug for the public-facing link, reused each year by editing the destination — brand.co/sale points at whatever sale is current. Internal channel links get dated slugs so the historical ones remain intact for auditing. Mixing these two ideas is what causes the annual argument about whether last year's links still work.

Store the template where links are made

A saved UTM preset in the link platform beats a document, because it applies at the moment of creation. If your tool supports campaign templates or bulk creation from a spreadsheet, put the template there and generate the whole set in one action. The goal is that building this year's links takes fifteen minutes and involves no decisions.

Write down last year's results next to the template

Clicks per surface, and whatever downstream metric you trust. When someone proposes dropping a channel or adding one, the argument has evidence. This is also the moment to notice that a placement produced almost nothing two years running.

Review the template once a year, not every campaign

Templates rot if nobody owns them. Pick one point in the year to revise the surface list — platforms change, channels die, new ones appear — and otherwise leave it alone. Constant tweaking recreates exactly the inconsistency the template was meant to prevent.