UTM Link Builder
Tag a campaign URL without breaking your own analytics.
What you provide
Where the traffic comes from: newsletter, google, partner name.
The channel type: email, cpc, social, referral. Keep to a short agreed list.
Distinguishes two links to the same destination in the same email or ad.
How this calculation works
Each value is cleaned of characters that would need escaping, optionally forced to lowercase, and added to the URL as a query parameter. Existing UTM parameters on the URL you paste are replaced rather than duplicated, since two values for the same parameter produce unpredictable results. Source, medium and campaign are flagged when empty, because those three are what analytics tools rely on to categorise a visit.
What the results mean
- Source
- Where the visit came from, such as newsletter or a partner name. Answers the question "who sent them".
- Medium
- The type of channel: email, cpc, social, referral. Answers "what kind of link was it", and this is the one that keeps reports readable.
- Campaign
- Which specific effort the link belongs to. Answers "why did we send it", and is what lets you compare one campaign against another.
Common problems and fixes
- One campaign appears as several rows in reporting
- Capitalisation, almost always. Analytics treats Newsletter, newsletter and NEWSLETTER as three separate sources and there is no way to merge them after the fact. Force lowercase on every parameter, agree a fixed vocabulary for medium, and keep the list somewhere the whole team can reach it.
- Traffic shows as direct despite being tagged
- Check whether the link redirects, since some redirects drop the query string entirely. Then check for a fragment placed before the parameters, which hides them from the server and from most analytics. And confirm the link is not being rewritten by an email platform or a link shortener that strips unknown parameters.
Frequently asked questions
Should I put UTM parameters on internal links?
No. Tagging a link between two pages of your own site starts a new session in most analytics tools, which overwrites the original source and makes it look as though the visitor arrived from your own campaign. Internal link tracking needs a different mechanism.
Which parameters are actually required?
Source and medium are the pair that matter most, since together they define the channel. Campaign is worth adding whenever you want to compare efforts against each other. Term and content are optional and mostly useful for paid keywords and for telling two links in the same message apart.
Do UTM parameters affect SEO?
They can create duplicate URLs for the same content, which is worth being aware of but rarely a real problem. A canonical tag on the page resolves it by telling search engines which version to index. The bigger practical issue is untidy URLs being shared and linked, which a canonical also handles.
Put this on your own site
Free to embed, no attribution required beyond the source link the frame carries itself. It runs entirely in your visitor's browser, sets no cookies and loads no third-party script.
<iframe src="https://runthetests.com/embed/utm-builder/" width="100%" height="560" style="border:1px solid #e5e5e5;border-radius:8px" title="UTM Link Builder" loading="lazy"></iframe>
Preview it at https://runthetests.com/embed/utm-builder/. Embedded pages are marked noindex, so yours stays the canonical copy — not this one.