UTMs are free, but disorganized UTMs ruin analytics. A few minutes of upfront convention saves hours of cleanup later. RevRoute auto-appends UTMs based on link settings or you can hard-code them in the destination URL — either way, the values you ship are what end up in your warehouse for years.

The five standard UTMs

Use all five when relevant. Empty UTMs are fine; missing UTMs you wish you had aren’t.

Naming conventions

A consistent scheme is more important than the perfect scheme. Pick rules and stick to them:

• Always lowercase. Affiliate and affiliate are different rows in a report. Force lowercase at the source.
• Hyphens, not underscores or spaces. q2-launch beats q2_launch and Q2 Launch (which becomes Q2%20Launch).
• ASCII only. Encoded Cyrillic / emoji UTMs are technically legal but hostile to dashboards.
• No timestamps in source/medium. Put them in utm_campaign if needed (spring-2026).
• Stable, not descriptive. utm_source=newsletter-weekly is good; utm_source=newsletter-about-our-new-feature is not — the campaign goes in utm_campaign.

Organic vs paid

The single most useful distinction in analytics is “did I pay for this click?”. Keep it visible in utm_medium:

That way, WHERE utm_medium IN ('cpc','paid-social','display','influencer-paid') is your paid acquisition cohort, every time.

Recommended source taxonomy

utm_source should answer “if I want to email the owner of this traffic, who do I email?”. For affiliate programs that means one source per partner:

utm_source=partner-acme
utm_source=partner-bob-blog
utm_source=partner-marketing-podcast

RevRoute sets this automatically for program links — every partner link includes utm_source=<partner-slug> so you don’t have to think about it.

For your own channels:

utm_source=newsletter            # the main list
utm_source=newsletter-prospects  # a specific list
utm_source=twitter
utm_source=youtube
utm_source=blog

Campaign naming

Campaigns benefit from a structured format:

{quarter}-{theme}-{audience?}
q2-launch
q4-black-friday
q1-2026-pricing-update-existing

The leading time period lets dashboards sort campaigns chronologically without parsing dates. Append an audience suffix when you’re running the same theme to different segments.

Where to set UTMs

Three options, in order of preference:

1. On the short link (utm_source, utm_campaign fields on the link settings). RevRoute appends them at redirect time. Best for partner program links — the partner can’t accidentally strip them.
2. In the destination URL. Works fine but you can’t change them without updating every place the link is shared.
3. In a separate script tag (e.g. via <DubAnalytics />’s built-in UTM tracking). Best for client-side tools that need to read UTMs before the redirect.

Avoid mixing #1 and #2 — duplicate parameters create confusion.

Migration: cleaning up legacy UTMs

If you inherited a chaotic UTM history:

See also: Attribution, Link management.