UTMs

Without tags, much of your traffic arrives in analytics as "direct" or as a vague "referral". A newsletter click, a social share and a partner link all blur together, so budget drifts towards whatever looks biggest, rather than whatever produces bookings. A tag costs a few extra characters and removes the guessing.

Tags also connect traffic to results. When the source and campaign are stored with a sign-up or a lead, you can see which campaign produced pipeline and revenue, not just visits. That is the difference between reporting clicks and deciding where the next pound goes.

The catch is consistency. "Email", "email" and "e-mail" show up as three separate sources, so a short naming rule matters more than the tagging itself.

• Tag every link you place yourself: emails, social posts, partner pages, printed QR codes.
• Agree a naming rule first and keep it in a shared sheet: all lower case, a short fixed list of mediums, and campaign names that match the ad platform.
• Build links with a URL builder instead of typing them, so a stray space or capital letter never splits one campaign into two rows.
• Check the tagged traffic within days of the first send, while a typo is still cheap to fix.

A UTM is a label attached to a web address after a question mark. The name comes from Urchin Tracking Module, the tool that analytics software grew out of. The three standard labels are utm_source (where the click came from, such as newsletter), utm_medium (the type of channel, such as email or cpc) and utm_campaign (which push it belongs to, such as spring-launch). Two optional ones, utm_term and utm_content, can record a keyword or tell two links in the same message apart.

A tagged link looks like this: yoursite.com/pricing?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring-launch. The visitor lands on the same page. The labels are only read by the analytics tool.

• Tagging links inside your own website. This overwrites the real source of the visit.
• Mixing "Email", "email" and "e-mail". Analytics treats them as three sources.
• Putting personal data, such as an email address, in a tag.