What are UTM parameters?

The five tags

A tagged link looks like this:

https://example.com/spring?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring_sale&utm_content=hero_button

• utm_source — who sent the traffic: newsletter, facebook, partner_blog. Required.
• utm_medium — the kind of link: email, cpc, social, affiliate. Required in practice, because channel rules rely on it.
• utm_campaign — the campaign or promotion: spring_sale.
• utm_term — the paid keyword, mostly for search ads.
• utm_content — which link or creative, to tell two links in the same email apart.

A naming convention that holds up

UTM values are free text, so reports are only as clean as the habits behind them. Four rules prevent most problems:

• Lowercase only. Facebook and facebook are two sources in most reports.
• A fixed list of mediums. email, cpc, social, display, affiliate, sms, referral — and nothing else.
• Underscores or hyphens, not spaces. Spaces become %20 and are easy to mistype.
• One sheet or tool for everyone. Links built by hand by five people will have five spellings.

UTM tags and ad click IDs

Ad platforms add their own parameter to every click — gclid for Google, fbclid for Meta, ttclid for TikTok. These click IDs identify the click itself and are added automatically, but they only say which platform; the campaign details live in the ad platform.

UTM tags are the opposite: you write them, they work on any link (email, QR code, partner post, SMS), and they carry the campaign name into your analytics. For ads, use both: the click ID makes attribution robust, the UTM tags make reports readable.

How TapCub uses UTM tags

The TapCub script reads all five UTM parameters from the landing URL and stores them on the session, along with the referrer and any ad click ID. They feed the channel rules (for example utm_medium=cpc plus a social source becomes paid social) and appear in the sources report as source, medium, campaign, term and content.

UTM values also become touchpoints in attribution reports, so you can compare first-touch and last-touch credit by utm_source or utm_campaign. To build links consistently, use the free UTM builder, which runs in the browser.

Common mistakes

• Tagging internal links. A UTM tag on a banner inside your own site restarts attribution and hides the real source of the visit.
• Losing tags in redirects. Some redirects drop the query string. Test the final URL after every short link or redirect.
• Putting personal data in tags. Never put an email address or name in a UTM value; it ends up in reports and logs.
• Using UTM tags on ads that already have click IDs, but inconsistently. If half your ads have tags and half do not, campaign reports will undercount the untagged half.

Related guides: Direct Traffic and Lead Tracking. See also email campaign tracking and QR code scan tracking.

See also: What are URL parameters? Query strings, examples and SEO.