Free UTM Builder
UTM tags are little labels added to a link so your analytics can tell you exactly where a visitor came from — which ad, which post, which email. Paste your link below, fill in the tags (or tap a preset), and copy your tracking-ready URL. Free, no sign-up, and nothing you type ever leaves your browser.
Keep this on. "Facebook" and "facebook" become two different sources in your reports.
Everything happens in your browser. Nothing you type is sent or stored anywhere.
What each tag means
A UTM link is just your normal URL with labels attached. Your analytics reads the labels and files the visit accordingly. Five tags exist — three that matter every time, two for special occasions:
Where the click physically comes from — the platform or referrer. Think proper nouns: google, facebook, instagram, tiktok, newsletter, yelp, qr. If someone asks “where did they click this?”, source is the answer.
The type of traffic — the channel category. The standard vocabulary: cpc for paid clicks, social for organic social posts, email for email, offline for QR codes and print. Keeping medium to a short fixed vocabulary is what makes your channel reports readable.
Which effort the link belongs to: spring-sale, brake-video, grand-opening, gbp. This is how you’ll compare campaigns against each other later, so name it something future-you will recognize in a report six months from now.
Tells variants apart inside the same campaign — video-a vs. video-b, header-link vs. footer-link in the same email. This is your A/B testing tag: same campaign, different creative, and now you know which one pulled.
Traditionally the paid search keyword. If you’re running Google Ads with auto-tagging (you should be), Google tracks keywords for you and you’ll rarely touch this one.
Three rules that keep your data clean
Where to see the results
Your tags show up in Google Analytics 4 under Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition — each session filed by the source, medium, and campaign you set. Mark your real conversions (purchases, form submits, phone clicks) as key events in GA4 and the same report shows which tagged links are producing customers, not just clicks. Test your setup by clicking one of your own tagged links, then confirming it appears in the report.
Common questions
What’s the difference between source and medium?
Source is the specific place (facebook, google, newsletter); medium is the kind of traffic (social, cpc, email). Together they read like a sentence: “paid clicks from Google” is google / cpc; “an organic post on Instagram” is instagram / social. If you can say the sentence, you can pick the tags.
Do UTM tags hurt SEO or change the page?
No. They’re standard tracking parameters — Google understands them, they don’t alter what the page shows, and they don’t affect rankings. The one habit worth keeping: don’t use tagged versions of a URL where a clean canonical link belongs, like in your site navigation or a sitemap.
The tagged links look long and ugly. Does that matter?
Only cosmetically — and only where humans see the raw URL. In ads, email buttons, and bio-link tools, the URL is hidden behind a button anyway. For places it shows (a printed piece, a text message), put the tagged link behind a short link or QR code and everyone’s happy.
Do I need UTMs on my Google Ads?
Usually not — link Google Ads to GA4 and turn on auto-tagging, and Google labels its own traffic with more detail than manual tags can. Manual UTMs are for everything Google doesn’t own: Meta and TikTok ads, organic social, email, print, and every other link you control.
Someone shared my tagged link somewhere else. Doesn’t that break the data?
A little, and it’s unavoidable — if your email link gets forwarded to a group chat, those clicks still report as “newsletter / email.” At small-business scale this noise is minor. It’s one of several honest limitations of attribution; we wrote up the full list — and how to work around it — in our attribution guide.
