utm_term and utm_content are the two optional UTM parameters you can add to a tracked link. utm_term records the keyword or targeting that produced the click, and utm_content tells apart two or more links in the same campaign that lead to the same page, such as two versions of an ad or two buttons in one email.
How utm_term and utm_content work
UTM parameters are short labels added to the end of a link after a question mark. Three of them carry the essential information: utm_source says where the visit came from, utm_medium says what kind of channel it was, and utm_campaign names the campaign. The two optional parameters add detail underneath:
- utm_term was designed for paid search keywords, so a click on an ad triggered by “emergency plumber croydon” could carry that phrase. Many marketers now also use it for the audience or targeting in paid social, such as utm_term=past-customers or utm_term=interest-gardening.
- utm_content identifies the creative or the exact link. Two Instagram ads in one campaign might carry utm_content=reel-15s and utm_content=carousel-reviews, and a newsletter might use utm_content=header-button and utm_content=footer-link.
A complete link might look like this: https://www.example.co.uk/winter-sale/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign=winter-sale-2026&utm_term=past-customers&utm_content=reel-15s
GA4 reads the values when the session starts. At the time of writing (October 2026), utm_term appears in GA4 as the manual term dimension and utm_content as the manual ad content dimension, each with session-scoped and first-user versions you can use in explorations. Neither affects channel grouping, which comes from source and medium, so an error here will not move visits into the wrong channel. It will simply make the detail unusable.
Some ad platforms can fill these values for you. Microsoft Advertising supports a keyword placeholder in its tracking template, and Meta lets you insert the ad set or ad name dynamically. Google Ads is a special case: with auto-tagging switched on, GA4 takes Google Ads click detail from the click identifier, so manual UTMs on Google Ads links are usually unnecessary.
Why it matters
Ad platforms report clicks and their own view of conversions. They do not tell you how those visitors behaved on your site compared with everyone else. utm_content lets you answer that question in GA4 for each creative, and utm_term does the same for each keyword or audience.
For a small UK business running Facebook ads and a monthly email, that is the difference between “the campaign brought 400 visits” and “the video ad brought visitors who stayed and enquired, and the static image brought visitors who left within seconds”. The second answer tells you where to spend next month’s budget. Because GA4 measures everything the same way, it is also the fairest place to compare channels that each mark their own homework.
Common mistakes
- Swapping the meanings between campaigns, so utm_content holds the creative in one campaign and the audience in another. The report then mixes two different things in one column.
- Inconsistent case. GA4 treats Video-A and video-a as different values, which splits one ad into two rows.
- Putting personal data in a value, such as an email address in utm_content when personalising newsletter links. Google’s terms forbid sending personally identifiable information to Analytics, and under UK GDPR you would be passing personal data to a third party with no lawful basis for it.
- Adding UTMs to links between pages on your own site. GA4 then credits anything the visitor does after that click to your own internal campaign instead of the channel that really brought them.
- Expecting utm_term to show organic search keywords. It only shows what you put in links, and Google does not pass organic queries to analytics; Search Console is where those live.
How to act on it
Write a short naming convention in a shared spreadsheet: lowercase, hyphens instead of spaces, and a list of allowed values. Decide once what each optional parameter means per channel, for example keyword or audience in utm_term and creative or link position in utm_content, and stick to it. Build links with a UTM link builder rather than typing them by hand, and keep the convention beside your other manual tagging rules.
Then open a GA4 exploration with session manual ad content as a dimension and your key events as metrics. If you run several paid platforms and want the tagging, naming and reporting set up properly once, it is part of how I approach PPC management.