Nine times out of ten, “our attribution is broken” isn’t an attribution problem. It’s a UTM problem. Someone tagged a campaign Facebook, someone else tagged it fb, a third person fat-fingered a trailing space, and now your channel report shows three different sources that are all, in fact, the same source. No tool fixes that. A convention does.
The five parameters
A UTM is just five labels you bolt onto a link so analytics knows where the click came from:
- utm_source, the specific platform: google, facebook, newsletter.
- utm_medium, the channel type: cpc, paid_social, email.
- utm_campaign, the campaign name, ideally dated so it sorts.
- utm_content, the specific ad or link variant, for clean A/B reads.
- utm_term, the keyword, mostly for manual paid-search tagging.
The rule that prevents most bugs
A convention you can paste into a doc
Write it down, share it, and link it from wherever people build URLs. A compact version that scales:
-- lowercase, no spaces, values from a fixed list ?utm_source=facebook // the platform &utm_medium=paid_social // the channel type &utm_campaign=2026-q3_retargeting // dated, so it sorts &utm_content=carousel_v2 // the variant
Good tags vs broken tags
| Broken | What it costs you | Fixed |
|---|---|---|
| utm_source=Facebook | Casing splits one source into two | utm_source=facebook |
| utm_medium=social | Can’t separate paid from organic | utm_medium=paid_social |
| utm_campaign=Summer Sale | The space breaks the URL | utm_campaign=2026-summer_sale |
| (paid link, no tag) | Lands in “direct”, credit vanishes | tag every paid placement |
The 20-minute audit
Run this on any account you inherit before you trust a single channel number:
- List every distinct source / medium and hunt for near-duplicates.
- Enforce one casing convention everywhere, fix the offenders on the spot.
- Confirm every paid placement is tagged (auto-tagging counts for Google Ads).
- Kill rogue spaces, stray capitals, and free-text campaign names.
- Document the convention where the next person will actually look.
Keep it clean
Conventions rot without an owner. Put the spec in a shared doc, route everyone through one link builder, and review the source/medium list monthly. Clean tags are the foundation everything sits on, every attribution model and every GA4 report is only as trustworthy as the UTMs feeding it. Maven flags the duplicates and gaps for you, so the audit takes minutes, not an afternoon.
Sources and references
Jamie Isabel
Founder at Maven
