Free UTM Builder
Build correctly encoded campaign URLs in seconds, with a warning when your naming is about to split one channel into three rows. Free, no account needed.
Where the traffic comes from: newsletter, instagram, google.
The channel type: email, social, cpc, print.
The specific promotion this link belongs to.
Optional. Mostly used for paid search keywords.
Optional. Tells two links in the same place apart.
Your tagged URL
Fill in the destination URL plus source, medium and campaign.
Next step
A tagged URL is long and looks cluttered on a slide or a flyer. Shorten it with the QRLinkify URL shortener and the UTM data still travels underneath, with a QR code for the same destination.
What each UTM field is for
There are five UTM parameters and only three of them matter most of the time. utm_source is where the traffic came from — newsletter, instagram, google. utm_medium is the type of channel — email, social, cpc, print. utm_campaign is the specific promotion — spring-sale, product-launch.
The other two are optional. utm_term records a paid search keyword, and utm_content tells apart two links pointing at the same page from the same place, like a header button versus a footer link. Add them only when you have a question they answer.
A useful way to keep source and medium straight: medium is a category you would reuse across many campaigns, source is the specific thing inside it. Email is a medium; your Tuesday newsletter is a source.
The naming mistakes that quietly ruin reports
UTM data almost never breaks in an obvious way. It degrades, one inconsistency at a time, until the report is a list of near-duplicates nobody trusts.
Capitalisation is the biggest culprit, because analytics tools treat Instagram and instagram as two separate sources. So are synonyms: facebook in one link and fb in another splits one channel across two rows. Spaces are a third — use hyphens, so spring-sale rather than spring sale.
The last one catches almost everyone at least once: never put UTM tags on links between pages of your own site. Internal links with UTMs overwrite the original source, so a visitor who arrived from Google gets recorded as coming from your own newsletter the moment they click an internal tagged link. The tool above warns you about capitals and spaces as you type, but this one is on you.
The fix that scales is boring and effective: write your naming rules in one short document and share it with anyone who builds links.
Shorten the tagged link before you share it
A fully tagged URL is long and ugly. That is fine in an email button where nobody sees the underlying address, and it is a problem anywhere the link is visible — a slide, a printed flyer, a message, or read aloud on a podcast.
Shortening solves the presentation problem without losing the data, because the UTM parameters travel underneath the redirect and still arrive in your analytics. Paste the result from above into the QRLinkify URL shortener and you get a clean link plus a QR code for the same destination.
For a campaign that runs across several channels at once, tagging one link at a time gets old fast. The bulk link shortener takes a CSV and applies UTM presets to the whole batch, and workspace presets let you set medium and campaign once so only the source changes per link. If you want the background on all of this, the UTM parameters guide covers it properly.