Will your campaign links add up?
Facebook, facebook and FaceBook are three sources in every report you will ever run.
No sign-upRuns in your browserNo limit
There is no address to tag
Paste the page you are sending people to, including https://.
utm_source is missing
Source is where the click came from: the newsletter's name, the network's name.
utm_medium is missing
Medium is the channel: email, social, cpc. Without it the visit is filed as direct traffic and the campaign disappears.
utm_campaign is missing
Campaign is the thing you are running, so several links can be counted together.
Paste a campaign link you are already using. It fills the fields above with what is actually in it, so you can see what your analytics is recording rather than what you meant.
The data cannot be repaired afterwards
Analytics records exactly what your link said. Six weeks later the campaign is split across four spellings, and there is no fixing it, because the clicks that made those rows have already happened.
Case is kept, and it counts
Analytics does not lowercase anything for you. Two people writing the same channel two ways produce two channels, and neither of them shows the real number.
A missing medium means direct traffic
Without utm_medium the visit is filed as if someone typed your address in. The campaign you spent money on does not appear in the report at all.
Nobody notices until they need the number
The link works, the page loads, the sale happens. The fault only surfaces on the day someone asks which channel is working.
Build one, or check one you have
Fill in the fields
The link builds as you type, lowercased and hyphenated, so every link you make matches every other.
Read the warnings
What will actually be recorded, which required field is missing, and which medium analytics will not recognise.
Or paste an existing link
It reads the parameters back out, so you can see what your report is really counting.
What it does
One spelling, every time
Everything is lowercased and hyphenated on the way out, because the alternative is finding three versions of one campaign in a report you cannot fix.
Names the missing ones
Source, medium and campaign are what analytics needs before a campaign exists at all. Each one is named separately with what it is for.
Mediums analytics recognises
Use anything else and the traffic is grouped under "other", where it stops being comparable to the rest of your channels.
Reads links back
Paste a link you already use and see what it really records. This is the half that finds the fault, since one link cannot disagree with itself.
Keeps the rest of the address intact
Parameters your page needs survive, old campaign tags are replaced rather than doubled, and anything after a # stays at the end where it belongs.
Warns about your own links
A campaign tag on a link between two of your own pages starts a new session and throws away where the visitor originally came from.
Straight talk about what it cannot see
It builds and reads links. What happens to them afterwards is between your analytics and your visitors.
It cannot fix data already collected
Parameters are recorded at the moment of the click. This stops the next six weeks being wrong; the last six are what they are.
It does not know your naming scheme
It makes every link consistent in FORM. Whether "march-launch" means the same thing to you and your agency is a conversation, not a check.
Some platforms strip or add parameters
A few networks rewrite links, and some email tools add their own tracking. Click your own link once and see what arrives.
Nothing leaves your machine
The link is built in your browser. No account, no history kept, and no limit on how many you make.
Make the next link the right one
Consistency is the only part of attribution you fully control, and it costs nothing.