You launch a campaign. You drop your link in your newsletter, in an Insta story, in your email signature, in an ad.
Three days later, you open your stats. And there, everything's thrown into the same bag: "direct". No idea what brought you customers, and what wasted your time.
UTM links fix exactly that. And it's a lot simpler than it looks.
What a UTM link is, concretely
A UTM link is just your usual URL with a bit of info added at the end. That info tells your stats tool (Google Analytics, Matomo...) where the person who clicked came from.
Your normal link:
https://tonsite.com
The same one, tagged for your newsletter:
https://tonsite.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=soldes-juin
Nothing magical. Just extra text. But that text changes everything: you now know this visitor comes from your newsletter, via email, as part of your soldes-juin campaign.
The 5 parameters (3 are enough to get started)
| Parameter | What it indicates | Example | Essential? |
|---|---|---|---|
utm_source |
Where the click comes from | newsletter, instagram |
Yes |
utm_medium |
The type of channel | email, social, cpc |
Yes |
utm_campaign |
The name of the operation | soldes-juin |
Yes |
utm_term |
The keyword (mostly in search ads) | chaussures-running |
Optional |
utm_content |
Tell two links from the same campaign apart | bouton-haut |
Optional |
At first, focus on the first 3. That's more than enough to see clearly.
The same example across 3 channels
You launch your "soldes-juin" campaign. You're going to drop 3 different links:
- Newsletter:
...?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=soldes-juin - Insta story:
...?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=soldes-juin - Meta ad:
...?utm_source=meta&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=soldes-juin
Same campaign, three sources. In your stats, you'll see exactly which of the three brought you the most people. No more "direct".
The 3 rules to never forget
Your stats tools are dumb and mean on one point: they're case-sensitive and space-sensitive. Facebook, facebook and FaceBook, to them, are three different sources. Your campaign ends up split across several lines, and your stats become unreadable.
Three rules, and you'll never have this problem:
- Everything lowercase. Always.
- Hyphens, not spaces.
soldes-juin, notsoldes juin. - Never put UTMs on your internal links (from one page of your site to another). It resets the counter to zero and pollutes everything.
How to get started in 2 minutes
You don't need to memorize all this. You paste your URL, you fill in 3 fields, it's generated. UTMzen even normalizes your values automatically (lowercase, hyphens, no accents), so you don't mess up.
The first time, it takes 2 minutes. After that you save your settings as a preset, and it's one click.
And all of a sudden, you stop flying blind.