UTM builder: assemble a tagged link for your ads

What UTM tags are

UTM tags are five parameters at the end of a link that tell Google Analytics where a visitor came from. Without them, a click from an Instagram ad and a click from a blogger’s story look the same in your report, and you can’t tell which spend brought the lead.

https://example.com/landing?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=spring_sale&utm_term=lookalike&utm_content=video_a

utm_source

Where the visitor came from: facebook, google, tiktok, newsletter. Required.

utm_medium

Type of traffic: cpc, paid_social, email, social. Required: GA4 picks the channel from it.

utm_campaign

Campaign or promotion name: spring_sale, black_friday. Required.

utm_term

Keyword or audience. Optional.

utm_content

Which ad, banner or button. Optional, useful for comparing creatives.

How to create a UTM link

1. Pick a platform and the builder fills in a template with its dynamic parameters.
2. Paste the address of the page your ad leads to and adjust the campaign name.
3. Already have a tagged link? Paste it into the address field: the builder lays its tags out as cars so you can fix them.
4. Copy the whole link, or only the parameters for the “URL parameters” field in the ad account.

UTM tags for Facebook and Instagram (Meta Ads)

In Meta you don’t add tags to the site address. Open the ad, go to “Tracking” → “URL parameters” and paste only the parameters. Meta fills in the campaign, ad set and ad names on every click, and replaces {{site_source_name}} with fb, ig, msg or an.

UTM tags for Google Ads

First turn on auto-tagging in the account settings: GA4 gets its data from it (the gclid parameter), and manual tags don’t get in its way. UTM tags in Google Ads are useful when a CRM or another analytics tool reads the data too. Paste the parameters into the campaign’s or account’s “Final URL suffix”: {campaignid}, {keyword} and {creative} are ValueTrack parameters that Google replaces with the campaign ID, keyword and ad ID.

UTM tags for TikTok Ads

In TikTok Ads, parameters are added at the ad level, in the URL parameters field. TikTok replaces the macros __CAMPAIGN_NAME__, __AID_NAME__ and __CID_NAME__ with the campaign, ad group and ad names. Before launch, click “Preview” and check that the macros turned into names.

Which utm_medium to choose

utm_medium decides which channel GA4 puts the visit in. If Google Analytics doesn’t recognise the value, the visits land in “Unassigned” and disappear from channel reports.

Where to see UTM tags in Google Analytics 4

Open Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition and choose “Session source / medium” or “Session campaign”. Right after launch, check the Realtime report: click your own link and the tags appear there within a minute.

Why UTM tags go missing

Sometimes ads are running and GA4 shows no visits with your tags. Usually the tags get lost on the way, before Google Analytics reads them:

• A redirect cuts them off. If the page redirects from an old address to a new one, from http to https or from www to non-www without passing on the part after the “?”, the tags disappear. Open the link and check that the tags are still in the address bar.
• The tags sit after “#”. In an address like /#/catalog?utm_source=facebook, GA4 doesn’t read anything after the hash as campaign tags. Tags must come before the “#”, which is how the builder assembles the link.
• The tags appear twice. If the site address in Meta already has tags and the same tags are in “URL parameters”, the link ends up with two utm_source values and the report becomes unpredictable. Keep them in one place.
• The visitor declined cookies. After a refusal in the EU, GA4 either doesn’t see the visit at all or, with Consent Mode in advanced setup, gets it without cookies and models part of the data. So GA4 usually shows fewer tagged visits than the ad account shows clicks.

A naming scheme that still works next month

Tags don’t break on day one. They break when there are twenty campaigns and everyone names them their own way. A practical scheme for utm_campaign goes from general to specific, parts joined with underscores and words inside a part with hyphens:

goal_product_geo_month → leads_kitchen-sets_kyiv_2026-11

• Latin letters and lower case only.
• Dates as 2026-11, so campaigns sort in order.
• The same words everywhere: if one campaign says “kyiv”, no other says “kiev”.
• The scheme lives in a shared document, and everyone who makes links takes it from there.

Common UTM mistakes

• Mixed case. GA4 treats “Facebook” and “facebook” as two rows. Use lower case.
• Spaces and non-Latin letters. In a link they turn into %20 and %D0%B0, which makes reports hard to read.
• UTM on internal links. A tag on a link inside your own site overwrites the source, and your ads lose their leads.
• An unpaid utm_medium on ads. With medium=social, ad traffic counts as unpaid social.
• A new scheme every time. spring_sale and Spring-Sale are two different campaigns. Agree on names once.