UTM parameters explained: setup and tracking for Indian marketers

A client once told me their Facebook ads were not working. They had spent ₹80,000 over three months and could not see any results. When I checked their Google Analytics, there were no UTM parameters on any of their links. Traffic from Facebook was showing up under "direct" traffic because of how some mobile apps strip referrer data. They were getting results, just not seeing them.

UTM parameters solve this completely. They are small pieces of text you add to your URLs that tell Google Analytics exactly where a visitor came from.

The five UTM parameters and what each one does

There are five standard parameters. You will use three of them almost every time.

utm_source tells Analytics where the traffic came from. For a Google Ad, this would be "google." For a WhatsApp broadcast, you might use "whatsapp." For your email newsletter, use "newsletter."

utm_medium tells Analytics what type of traffic channel it is. "cpc" for paid ads, "email" for email campaigns, "social" for organic social posts.

utm_campaign is the specific campaign name. Make this descriptive: "diwali-sale-2022" or "mumbai-office-launch" or "ramadan-offer-may."

utm_term is used for paid search to track which keyword triggered the ad. utm_content is used when you are A/B testing two different ad creatives in the same campaign.

Building UTM links properly

Google has a free Campaign URL Builder tool at ga-dev-tools.web.app. Paste your landing page URL, fill in the fields, and it generates the final URL for you. This is the safest method because it handles special character encoding automatically.

A typical UTM URL looks like this: yourwebsite.com/offer?utm_source=meta&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=diwali-sale-2022

For WhatsApp campaigns specifically, I add utm_source=whatsapp and utm_medium=message. This distinguishes WhatsApp traffic from other social channels, which matters because WhatsApp is so important in Indian lead generation.

Organising your UTM naming convention

The biggest mistake teams make is inconsistency. One person writes "Facebook" and another writes "facebook" and Google Analytics treats these as two different sources. Lowercase everything. Use hyphens instead of spaces. Document your naming convention in a shared Google Sheet and stick to it.

Create a master sheet with columns for campaign name, source, medium, content, the final URL, and the start date. Every new campaign gets a row. This takes five minutes to set up and saves hours of confusion later.

Reading the data in Google Analytics

In Universal Analytics, go to Acquisition, then Campaigns, then All Campaigns. In Google Analytics 4, go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic Acquisition, and look at the session source/medium column.

Filter by your campaign name and you will see exactly how many sessions came from that campaign, what the bounce rate was, and whether they converted. This is how you compare Meta ads versus Google Ads versus email for the same campaign period.

Frequently asked questions