Every marketing team starts tagging links with good intentions. Then one person writes Facebook,
another writes facebook, a third writes fb — and three months later your analytics
report has the same channel split across five rows. The fix isn't a smarter tool. It's a naming convention: a
short, boring set of rules that everyone follows every time.
Rule 1: lowercase everything
UTM parameters are case-sensitive in most analytics platforms, which means Email and
email are counted as two different sources. The simplest way to eliminate an entire class of
errors is to agree that every value is always lowercase. No exceptions, no debates about proper nouns.
Rule 2: underscores inside values, never spaces
Spaces get encoded as %20 and turn your links into unreadable soup. Dashes are fine, but they're
often used inside real words. Underscores make the separation between words obvious at a glance:
summer_sale_2026 reads cleanly in both the URL and the report.
Rule 3: fix your vocabulary for source and medium
Source is where the click comes from; medium is what kind of channel it is. Keep the list of allowed values short and written down:
utm_medium— pick from a closed list:email,social,cpc,referral,qr.utm_source— the platform name, always the same spelling:newsletter,facebook,linkedin,google.utm_campaign— a predictable pattern like{theme}_{year}:spring_launch_2026.
Rule 4: make campaign names sortable
Put the stable part first and the variable part last. launch_2026_spring and
launch_2026_fall sit next to each other in an alphabetically sorted report;
spring_launch and fall_launch don't. If you run many campaigns, adding a date prefix
like 2026_06 makes reports read like a timeline.
Rule 5: write it down and put it where people work
A convention that lives in someone's head isn't a convention. Keep a one-page cheat sheet with the allowed values and two or three real examples, and link to it from wherever links get built. Better yet, save your common combinations as presets in a builder so nobody types values by hand at all.
That's the whole system: lowercase, underscores, a fixed vocabulary, sortable names, and a written cheat sheet. It takes ten minutes to agree on and saves hours of report clean-up every quarter.
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