UTM without the chaos: how to name your campaigns so reports stay clean
Three UTM parameters and a few naming rules separate a readable report from one where a campaign shows up five times. How to standardise them and save them in Li-Nk.
UTM parameters are labels added to the end of an address that tell your analytics tool where a visit came from. They work well until the same campaign is written “Spring”, “spring”, “Spring-2026” and “spr_26” by three different colleagues. Then the report shows four campaigns instead of one.
The three basic parameters
- utm_source: where the visit comes from (newsletter, facebook, sms, poster);
- utm_medium: the type of channel (email, social, cpc, print);
- utm_campaign: the name of the campaign (autumn-offer-2026).
Five writing rules
- Lowercase only. “SMS” and “sms” are different values for your analytics tool.
- No diacritics and no spaces. Use hyphens: “autumn-offer”, not “Autumn offer”.
- A fixed vocabulary. Choose a short list of sources and mediums and use only values from it.
- A template for campaign names. For example: product-season-year (courses-autumn-2026).
- Do not put UTM on links inside your own website. They restart the session and hide the real source.
In Li-Nk
Under “Parameters” you can save sets of parameters as templates and apply them to new links, instead of typing them by hand. You can group the links of the same action in a campaign, and you can define the channels (sms, email, print) separately, so you can compare them with each other. Your Li-Nk statistics and those from your analytics tool complement each other: the former show the clicks on the link, the latter show what people did after they reached the website.
A complete example
For an SMS message in the autumn campaign, the destination address would be: https://company.com/offer?utm_source=sms&utm_medium=message&utm_campaign=autumn-offer-2026. You shorten it once and use the short link in the message; the parameters stay behind it, unseen by the customer.
