What is the best practice for UTM management?

There are three over-riding principles to good UTM management:

1. Good governance. Make sure the whole UTM process is clearly defined, has an owner and can be adapted to suit the changing needs of the business.

2. Quality data. Make sure no channels or campaigns are missing and that data is clean and not corrupted.

3. Easy-to-use data. Data should be easy for users to access, interpret and use for analysis and decision-making.

This is what we would recommend as best practice:

1. Create a "Taxonomy Guardian". Designate someone to be accountable for making sure all campaigns are tracked correctly. Internal marketers and external media agencies often forget to apply codes, or make mistakes, affecting the quality of your analytics data and your team's ability to make data-driven decisions.

2. Don't use a spreadsheet. We know we gave you a free one, but spreadsheets don't scale well. They easily break and can be troublesome when they are shared with multiple users - the more users, the bigger the problems. Downloadable spreadsheets can be very hard to keep track of - users end up using out-of-date versions, or hacking them to suit their needs. It can also be hard to enforce naming conventions and rules around uniformity, hierarchy, spelling, and capitalisation. They certainly do not provide a record of all links created or a user history for accountability. Basically, don't use them.

3. Never retype the UTM by hand. Always copy and paste the whole link from Uplifter or the CSV download. This ensures the URL is correct and stops human error. Better still, copy the short link which is much easier to handle.

4. Name campaigns clearly. Your campaign names should be simple and use recognisable terms, in a good canonical structure (the name should start with campaign group and end with the date). This enables users to understand what data they are looking at without having to use a lookup table to decipher its meaning.

5. No inappropriate language. It is possible for your end users to see the campaign link and therefore it should not contain inappropriate or discriminatory language.

6. No long parameter names. Keep any names under 20 characters and your whole URL under 242 characters.

7. Be careful with special characters. Follow these rules to stop the code from breaking:

   • Question Marks should never be used, except at the start of the query string

   • Ampersands should only be used as connectors between parameters

   • Equals symbols should only be used between a parameter name and its value

   • Spaces in a code should be replaced by underscores or pipe symbols. Spaces could either break the code or be represented as a messy '%20'

   • Upper case should be avoided. Use lower case letters wherever possible to make your reports easier to read.

8. No need to use ALL the parameters. Don't label the term or content fields as 'none' if they are not actively beingused. Just complete the necessary fields.

9. Don't use the same code twice. Using the same code for a repeat campaign, will combine all the traffic, conversions and behaviour into one pot you cannot separate. Add an identifier so you can tell them apart.

10. Beware of redirects. If your landing page has a redirect, you need to implement campaign links on both the original landing page and the redirect page. Otherwise, the original landing page could be picked up as the referrer of traffic.

11. Don't use campaign links on internal website links. If you do, your campaign data will be overwritten, and you will lose the original tracking source. You can use internal promotion code parameters for tracking internal links.