UTM cheat sheet and link generator

    Tag a link in ten seconds, and see where it will land in reporting

    Generate a tagged link

    Fill in the fields above and your link will appear here

    The rules, in one table

    ParameterWhat it meansUse one of these
    utm_sourceWhere the click came frompardot linkedin youtube or the partner’s name
    utm_mediumWhat kind of marketing it wasemail social paidsocial referral
    utm_campaignWhich campaign or sendFree text, lower case, hyphens not spaces

    Two rules that break everything if ignored

    • Lower case throughout. Email and email are different values to a database. Splitting one channel across two spellings makes every report wrong in a way nobody notices for months.
    • No spaces, use hyphens. maximet-launch, never MaxiMet Launch.

    Never tag these

    • Links between pages on our own websites. Tagging an internal link resets the visitor’s source and wipes the record of how they originally found us. If someone arrives from a Pardot email and then clicks a tagged internal link, they stop being an email visitor. This is the most common way a UTM setup gets quietly ruined.
    • Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Already handled automatically at account level. Tagging by hand double-tags and breaks it.
    • Organic Google results. Not possible, the link belongs to Google.

    Campaign naming

    Free text, but consistency is what makes it useful six months later.

    product-audience-detail
    • maximet-aws-launch
    • windultra-uav-webinar
    • labcal-flowmeter-reminder
    • gsc-motorsport-newsletter-jul26

    Prefix with the brand where it isn’t obvious: gi-, gsc-, labcal-.

    Check it worked, once

    Do this with your first tagged send, before doing them all.

    1. Send a test to yourself and click the link.
    2. Confirm the UTMs are still in the address bar when the page loads. If they vanish, something is stripping them and that needs fixing before going further.
    3. Fill in the enquiry form.
    4. In Salesforce, find the Lead. utm_source__c and utm_medium__c should be filled in.

    Step 2 is the one to watch. We have been caught by stripped UTMs before, so it is worth thirty seconds of checking.

    Why we bother

    Most of our enquiries currently arrive with no record of what brought that person to us. Not because the enquiries are poor, but because the links they came from carry no label. That makes it harder than it should be to decide where marketing budget does the most good. Email is one of our largest sources of enquiries and those links are entirely within our control, so tagging them is the easiest and biggest improvement available to us.

    Reporting tolerates reasonable variants, so e-mail, newsletter and nurture all count as Email. The values in the table above are still the ones to use. Questions to Michelle Errington.