Decide what each field means
A naming convention is a short written list that everyone tagging links follows. Start with the three required fields. Source says where the visitor comes from, such as a newsletter name or a platform. Medium says what type of channel it is, such as email or social. Campaign names the initiative the link belongs to, such as an autumn sale.
Use content only to tell apart links inside one campaign, for example two buttons in the same email. Term is mainly for paid search keywords and can usually stay empty. A small set of fields that people actually fill in is better than a long scheme that gets skipped.
Use lowercase and one separator
Analytics tools commonly treat differently capitalised values as separate labels, so Email, email and EMAIL can appear as three rows in a report. Choose lowercase and keep to it. The UTM link builder trims what you type but does not change its case, so the rule has to be a habit or a team agreement.
Choose one separator for multi-word values and use it every time. Hyphens, as in autumn-sale, are easy to read. Avoid spaces: the builder writes a space as a plus sign in the link, which is harder to read and easy to mistype. Avoid accents and symbols that different tools may encode differently.
Use medium values your analytics tool recognises
Google Analytics 4 sorts traffic into default channels using the medium and source. Its definitions put traffic into the Email channel when the medium is email, e-mail, e_mail or e mail, and they recognise mediums such as social and display for the Organic Social and Display channels. The definitions are not case sensitive. For a newsletter link, a medium of email therefore groups the traffic more usefully than a custom word such as newsletter-email.
Paid search needs more than a medium: its rule also expects a search site as the source, so check it before you rely on it. These rules can change, so read Google's default channel group definitions for the current version.
Example result
https://example.com/offer?utm_source=autumn-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=autumn-saleBuild links from your list
Open the UTM link builder, paste the destination and fill in source, medium and campaign from your list. If you already have a tagged link, paste it and choose Read existing tags to see its current values and correct them. Existing query parameters and the fragment after the # are kept.
Save defaults can store your usual values in this browser only, which saves retyping them. The destination URL is never saved with them.
Check an export for values that break the convention
After a few campaigns, export the source, medium or campaign values from your analytics reports as a single column. Paste your approved values into List A of Compare two lists and the exported values into List B, with Ignore letter case turned off so that Email counts as different from email. Only in B lists the values that are not on your approved list: misspellings, capitalisation variants and one-off labels. Only in A lists approved values that have not appeared yet.
If the export contains repeated values, Text cleanup can remove duplicates first, and the missing-items guide explains how to read each result.
Example input
List A — approved mediums
email
social
referral
List B — exported mediums
email
Email
newsletter
socialExample result
Only in A: referral
In both lists: email, social
Only in B: Email, newsletterKeep the list where people will see it
Put the approved sources, mediums and one naming example in a shared document or spreadsheet that anyone tagging links can find, and add a new value there before using it. Review the list when a report shows a new variant.
Avoid renaming values in the middle of a campaign: earlier visits stay under the old name, so the report splits in two. Fix links that are still live, and note the change so the history is understandable later.