What is UTM parameters in advertising?

UTM parameters (UTM tags): what it means in advertising

Definition

UTM parameters are tags appended to a destination URL that tell your own analytics where a visit came from. The five are utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content and utm_term. They give you a record of traffic that belongs to you rather than to the ad platform, which is what makes any attribution comparison checkable.

What to know

Consistency is the entire value. facebook, Facebook and fb are three different sources in a report, and a naming convention agreed after six months of traffic cannot repair the six months already recorded.

UTMs are last-click by nature, so they will disagree with platform-reported numbers and both will disagree with your blended figures. The disagreement is information: a channel claiming far more conversions than UTMs record is claiming credit for demand that arrived another way.

Related terms

Attribution windowAn attribution window is the period after seeing or clicking an ad during which a conversion is still credited...Blended ROASBlended ROAS is total revenue from all sources divided by total advertising spend across all platforms. It is ...PixelA pixel is a snippet of JavaScript on your site that reports visitor actions back to an ad platform: page view...IncrementalityIncrementality is the share of conversions that genuinely happened because of advertising, rather than convers...

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