For a B2B marketer running paid social, email, webinars and partner promotions at the same time, that comparison is the whole point of reporting. This guide explains what each UTM parameter records, walks through one complete tagged link, and covers when to tag a link and when to leave it alone.

What UTM stands for and how UTM parameters work

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Urchin was a web analytics company that Google bought in 2005 and used as the foundation for Google Analytics. The name stuck, even though Urchin itself is long gone.

A UTM parameter is a label and a value joined by an equals sign, such as utm_source=linkedin. The tags sit after a question mark at the end of a normal web address, and an ampersand separates one tag from the next. They do not change the page the visitor sees. The page loads exactly as it would without them.

What changes is what your analytics tool records. When the visit starts, the tool reads the tags in the address and files the visit under the source, medium and campaign you wrote. That is why UTM tracking needs no setup inside the tool itself: Google Analytics 4 reads UTM values on its own as long as its tag is on the landing page.

GA4 is not the only tool that reads them. HubSpot, most marketing automation tools and most web analytics tools look for the same five tags, which makes UTM parameters one of the few conventions most tools in a marketing stack understand.

Because the tags are plain text in the address, anyone who clicks your link can see them, and anyone they forward it to. Keep values descriptive, but never put anything private in them, such as a client's name, an email address or an internal budget code.

The five UTM parameters, with examples

Throughout this guide, the example is a LinkedIn campaign promoting a webinar. The values below come from that campaign.

utm_source

utm_source records the website or platform that sent the visit. In the example, the value is linkedin. The common mistake is writing the same platform several ways, such as LinkedIn, linkedin and li, which splits one source across several rows in your reports. Other common values are google, newsletter and the name of a partner whose newsletter carries your link. Keep the value to the platform itself, without www or .com, so the same source looks the same in every report.

utm_medium

utm_medium records the type of channel. For the paid LinkedIn ad, the value is paid_social. For an organic post on the company page, it is social. The mistake here is inventing a new medium value for every campaign. GA4 uses this value to sort visits into channels such as Paid Social and Organic Social, and values it does not recognise end up as Unassigned. Good medium values describe the type of channel in one or two words: paid_social, social, cpc for paid search, email, display and referral for partner links. If you find yourself writing a medium that describes a single campaign, such as webinar, it belongs in utm_campaign instead.

utm_campaign

utm_campaign records the campaign name. In the example, it is webinar-b2b-analytics-2026-11, which says what the campaign is, what it is about and when it ran. The mistake is a vague name like "webinar" that collides with every other webinar you run. The campaign name is what groups everything together. In the example, the paid ad, the organic post and the reminder email all share webinar-b2b-analytics-2026-11, so one filter shows the whole effort across channels. Agree a pattern for campaign names and use it every time, so names sort sensibly in reports.

utm_content

utm_content tells apart links within the same campaign, usually different ads or placements. The paid ad uses video-ad-a and the organic post uses company-page-post. The mistake is skipping it, then having no way to see which ad brought the visits. Typical values describe the format and variant of an ad, such as video-ad-a and carousel-b, or the placement of an organic link, such as company-page-post or email-footer. If you test two ads against each other, utm_content is what lets you compare them after the click as well as before it.

utm_term

utm_term was built for paid search, to record the keyword someone searched for. The LinkedIn example does not need it. The mistake is filling it with values that have nothing to do with keywords, which makes the field useless for the paid search team. If you run paid search through Google Ads, auto-tagging usually records keywords for you, so manual utm_term values are mostly used for other search networks.

Source, medium and campaign belong on every tagged link. Content and term are optional.

A full UTM link, broken down

Here is the paid ad link from the webinar campaign:

https://www.example.com/webinar/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=webinar-b2b-analytics-2026-11&utm_content=video-ad-a

The organic post on the company page uses almost the same link:

https://www.example.com/webinar/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=webinar-b2b-analytics-2026-11&utm_content=company-page-post

Only utm_medium and utm_content change. Both links share a source and a campaign, so the webinar shows up as one campaign in your reports, while the paid and organic traffic stay separate. GA4 sorts utm_medium=paid_social into its Paid Social channel and utm_medium=social into Organic Social.

The order of the tags does not matter to your analytics tool, but keeping the same order on every link makes links easier to read and check. Put the page address first, then source, medium, campaign and content, every time.

The same structure works on every channel. In an email, the tagged link sits behind a button. In a QR code, it is encoded in the square. The tags are identical either way, which is what lets you compare channels side by side.

Typing these by hand is where most errors start. We built a free UTM builder to keep our own campaign links consistent, then made it public for other marketers.

When to use UTM parameters, and when not to

Use UTM tags on links you place outside your own website, where you control the link but not the page it sits on. In a typical B2B marketing plan, that covers:

• paid ads on LinkedIn, Meta and other networks

• organic posts on your company page and your team's personal profiles

• emails and newsletters

• links in partner newsletters and co-marketing content

• webinar reminders, event follow-ups and post-event emails

• QR codes on printed material, such as event banners and handouts

Do not use them on internal links, the links between pages on your own site. When a visitor clicks an internal link that carries UTM tags, many analytics tools start a new visit and credit it to whatever those tags say. Someone who arrived from a Google search and then clicked a tagged banner on your homepage would suddenly look like they came from the banner. Your organic search numbers shrink and your banner looks more successful than it is.

Google Ads deserves its own note. When auto-tagging is switched on, Google Ads adds its own click identifier to every ad click, and GA4 uses it to report the campaign. Adding manual UTM tags on top can create conflicting data, so check how your Google Ads and GA4 accounts are set up before you add them there.

Tagged links also travel. If someone copies the link from your LinkedIn ad and pastes it into a team chat, everyone who clicks it is recorded as coming from your LinkedIn ad. It is rarely a big effect, but it explains the occasional odd spike from a campaign that has already ended.

Rules that keep UTM data usable

UTM data is only as useful as it is consistent, and consistency comes from a few habits.

Write every value in lowercase. UTM values are case sensitive in GA4, so LinkedIn and linkedin become two separate rows that each tell half the story. Our guide on UTM case sensitivity covers how to fix data that is already split.

Never use spaces. A space in a link becomes %20 or a plus sign, which makes reports harder to read and filters harder to write. Use hyphens between words in campaign and content values, and write medium values exactly as your convention lists them, such as paid_social.

Agree one value for each platform and stick to it. If your team uses linkedin, nobody writes li or linkedin.com. A simple way to hold that line is a written UTM naming convention that lists the approved values for source and medium and the pattern for campaign names.

Check every link before it goes live. Click it, make sure the page loads, and confirm the campaign appears in your analytics tool's real-time view. A broken link caught before launch costs a minute. One caught after a week of ad spend costs the week.

Write values a colleague can read without a decoder. webinar-b2b-analytics-2026-11 is longer than wb26, but anyone who opens the report next year will know what it was.

Keep the lists of values short. A team that uses six medium values and a dozen sources can hold them in their heads and spot a stray one in a report at a glance. A team with forty values cannot.

Where to see UTM data once people click

In GA4, UTM values appear under Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. Switch the main dimension to Session campaign to see one row per campaign, and add Session source / medium to split it by platform and channel type. Our step-by-step guide to the GA4 UTM report covers every dimension and the common problems, such as rows labelled (not set).

To compare individual ads, add Session manual ad content as a secondary dimension, which is where GA4 shows the utm_content value. For a campaign that ran on several channels, Session campaign as the primary dimension and Session source / medium as the secondary one shows the whole campaign broken down by channel in one table.

Give a new campaign a day before you judge it. GA4's Realtime report shows tagged visits within minutes, but the standard reports can take a day or more to process fully.

Analytics tools report on visits. Your CRM holds the leads. To see which campaign each lead came from, capture the UTM values in hidden fields on your forms, so they are saved to the lead record when someone submits a form. Our guide to UTM parameters in your CRM walks through the setup for HubSpot and Salesforce, including how to keep the values when a visitor moves between pages before converting.

What UTM parameters cannot tell you

UTM parameters record the channel and campaign behind a visit. They do not record who the visitor is or which company they work for.

In B2B, that matters. A buying decision usually involves several people at one company, and most of the people researching you never fill in a form. Your GA4 report can tell you the LinkedIn webinar campaign brought 300 visits. It cannot tell you whether any of those visits came from the companies you were paying LinkedIn to reach.

Leadfeeder reads a website at company level rather than user level, which fills that gap. Web Visitors lets you see which companies visit your site, by name, with the pages each one read. Leadfeeder Web Insights shows, for each campaign, how many companies came and how many fit your ideal customer profile, so you can judge the webinar campaign by the companies it brought as well as the clicks. It runs on one tracking script, ready in minutes, and sits alongside GA4 as part of your B2B website analytics. Tag the campaign, then open the Campaigns report in Web Insights after a week.

UTM parameters for specific channels

Each channel has its own quirks. On LinkedIn, Campaign Manager can add UTM tags to your ads automatically with its URL tracking parameters, and organic posts need tagging by hand. Our guide to LinkedIn UTM parameters covers both, with values you can copy.

AI assistants add their own tags. If you have seen utm_source=chatgpt.com in your reports, ChatGPT added it to a link it cited in an answer. Our guide to the ChatGPT UTM source explains what the tag captures and what it misses.

Email deserves the same care. Tag every link in a newsletter with utm_medium=email and a utm_content value for the position of the link, such as header-link or footer-link, so you can see which placement people click.