Your tracked link
This builder adds campaign tags to a link so that Google Analytics 4 can tell you exactly which email, post or ad sent each visitor. Fill in the address and the three required fields, and the tagged link appears straight away, ready to copy into your email platform, social scheduler or ad. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
How to fill it in
Paste the page you want people to land on, then describe the visit in three parts. Source is where it came from (facebook, linkedin, mailchimp, or the name of a partner site). Medium is the kind of channel (email, paid_social, social, referral). Campaign is the push the link belongs to, such as spring_sale_2026 or webinar_march_2026.
The two optional fields are for comparing variants inside one campaign. Use utm_content to tell apart two ads, two buttons in the same email or a video against a still image, and utm_term for the keyword or audience behind a paid placement. If you are not going to compare anything, leave them blank. My entry on utm_term and utm_content has examples of when each one earns its place.
As you type, the builder converts everything to lower case, swaps spaces for underscores and removes punctuation that would break the link. That is deliberate: GA4 treats Facebook and facebook as two different sources, and one capital letter is enough to split a campaign across two rows in your reports.
Naming rules that keep reports clean
- Write the rules down once. Keep a shared sheet listing the sources and mediums your business uses and copy from it. The most common cause of messy GA4 reports is several people each tagging links their own way.
- Use full platform names. Write facebook and instagram rather than fb or ig, so paid and organic traffic from the same platform sit side by side.
- Choose mediums GA4 recognises. GA4 sorts traffic into its default channel groups mainly by medium. A value it does not recognise, such as newsletter_link or whatsapp_post, usually ends up under Unassigned, where nobody looks.
- Put the date in the campaign name. A name like boxing_day_2026 still makes sense next December, when you are comparing it with this year.
- Keep personal data out. Never put an email address, name or customer number in a tag. Google’s analytics terms forbid sending personal information, and under UK GDPR you would be collecting it with no lawful basis.
If you need channels GA4 has no rule for, for example printed leaflets with a QR code, tag them consistently and add a custom channel group in GA4 so they get their own line instead of disappearing.
Reading the notes under your link
Once the link appears, the builder checks it against the rules above. It warns you if the medium is outside the usual set, if you have used an abbreviation such as fb, or if the campaign name has no year. A warning is not an error; the link still works. It is a prompt to check the value matches what everyone else in your business uses.
If you enter google as the source and cpc as the medium, the builder points out that Google Ads does not normally need manual tags. With auto-tagging switched on, Google adds its own click identifier and GA4 reads the campaign details from your linked Ads account. Adding UTM tags on top can cause a clash, so only use them there if auto-tagging is off.
Where tags help, and where they do harm
Tag every link you control that sits outside your own website: emails, organic social posts, Meta and LinkedIn ads, partner and affiliate links, QR codes. Without tags, a click from the Facebook app often arrives as a referral from l.facebook.com or with no source at all, and a click from an email app often shows up as direct traffic. That gap is one reason the figures in Meta and GA4 rarely agree, which I go into in why GA4 and Facebook conversion numbers do not match.
Do not tag links from one page of your site to another. GA4 will credit the visit to your internal campaign instead of the search, ad or email that actually brought the person in. Use events for internal clicks instead.
For a UK site, remember the cookie banner. GA4 only records full visit data, campaign tags included, for visitors who accept analytics cookies, so a tagged campaign will almost always look smaller in GA4 than in the platform that sent the clicks. Advanced consent mode fills some of that gap with modelled data, but it never closes it completely.
When the numbers still do not add up
Tagged links tell you where visits came from. They do not tell you whether those visits turned into enquiries; that depends on your conversion events firing correctly. If campaigns are tagged but GA4 still shows few or no leads against them, start with my guide on how to check your conversion tracking works. If you would rather someone set up tagging and tracking across all your paid channels, that is part of my performance marketing work, and you can get in touch to talk it through.