URLTO GUIDE
The hard part of UTM is consistency, not adding parameters.
A few campaigns can survive inconsistent labels. Months later, mixed capitalization, abbreviations and spacing split the same channel into multiple rows and make comparison harder.
A simple baseline
- Use lowercase values
- Choose either underscores or hyphens for spaces and stick to it
- Use source for platform, medium for channel type, and campaign for purpose or initiative
- Document any team abbreviations
Example
- utm_source=instagram
- utm_medium=social
- utm_campaign=2026_fall_launch
- utm_content=story_a
Patterns to avoid
- Mixing Google, google and GOOGLE
- Using social, sns and social_media for the same thing
- Naming a campaign only after an individual owner
- Putting creative identifiers into source or medium
A URLTO workflow
Create the tagged destination in the UTM Builder, then shorten it. The shared link stays compact while the destination keeps the campaign labels needed by your analytics platform.