UTM parameters: the complete practical guide
What each of the five parameters means, a naming convention that survives contact with a real team, and the mistakes that split your reports.
By ShortFreeURL Team · 31 May 2026
The five parameters
utm_source is where the traffic came from (newsletter, instagram, partner-name). utm_medium is the marketing channel type (email, social, cpc, qr, affiliate). utm_campaign is the initiative (spring-sale-2026). utm_term carries paid keywords. utm_content distinguishes variants of the same campaign — which button, which creative, which placement.
The rule that prevents most problems
Analytics tools treat Email, email and EMAIL as three different mediums. Lowercase everything, always, and use hyphens rather than spaces or underscores consistently. One deviation splits a campaign across multiple rows in every report you build for the next year.
A convention that works
source = the specific property, medium = the channel category, campaign = a name with a date suffix. So instagram / social / spring-sale-2026, and mailchimp / email / spring-sale-2026. The date suffix matters more than it looks: without it, next year's spring sale merges into this year's numbers.
Where UTMs get lost
Redirect chains drop query strings. Single-page apps sometimes rewrite the URL before analytics reads it. Apps that open links in an in-app browser occasionally strip parameters. If a channel reports far fewer sessions than clicks, test the actual path a real user takes on a real phone.
Let the link carry the UTMs
Putting UTMs on the short link rather than the pasted destination keeps the shared URL clean and lets you fix a typo after the campaign has gone out. Save the combinations you use repeatedly as templates so nobody on the team has to remember the convention.
Do not UTM-tag internal links
Tagging links between pages of your own site restarts the session attribution and overwrites the original source. Use them only on links arriving from outside.