- Stay consistent to naming to avoid bad data: Stay consistent with your naming to ensure reporting uniformity. If you use facebook as a source in one campaign, don’t use Facebook, FaceBook, FB, fb, fbook, or any other variant in other campaigns. This will only dilute your data and create different codes for each one.
- Upper and lowercase will be read different: Google Analytics reads “Facebook” and “facebook” differently. utm_ABC and utm_abc will be read as two separate utm_campaigns in Google Analytics, which will generate false data by diluting figures across two separate lists. Since Google Analytics defaults its own data to lowercase, make sure to follow consistent nomenclature and use lowercase as well – or just stick to one.
- Tags should reflect how granular you want to go: Try to consider how much information you want to track. As an example, you could label traffic from a campaign as either: “?utm_campaign=facebook_oct1” or “?utm_campaign=facebook_oct”. As you can see, the first tag shows that the traffic came from a campaign that was posted on October 1st, whereas the second shows that the campaign was from October in general. If you are using multiple posts for one campaign, then being more specific in this way can give you more actionable data.
- Have a company/team wide system/naming convention: This means everyone follows a formula for the UTM tags. It’s always best to use a UTM builder in order to ensure consistency and speed. This means that all of your tagging will follow a similar pattern and you won’t be left typing out new UTM tags every time you make a post.
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Keep documentation: We suggest having a shared document for your team with UTM naming rules, and all the URLs that have been tagged, so you know what to look for when tracking them.
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Shorten URLs: Lastly, sharing a link with multiple UTM parameters can look messy. As a result, it’s best to use a branded link that doesn’t show all of the UTM tags. You can do this by using Google Analytics’ URL shortener for links that you post, use website redirect pages, or a QR code.