This is an updated version of this article I wrote 11 years ago, which was written before GA4 launched but also included using bit.ly links if you just want to count clicks on a specific link.

With your 2026 website strategy needing to mean you’re omnipresent (found everywhere from social media to Google to ChatGPT), clients are asking more than ever how they can know where people came from. Which social media post worked, which ad is converting people?

This is where UTM parameters come in.

UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module” – but you could easily go your whole career and not know that and it wouldn’t matter. I find it an interesting spot of history though that Urchin was a Traffic Monitor which launched in 2002 (after years establishing themselves as a web log analysis company) and then in 2005 was acquired by Google to become Google Analytics.

And we still have the term “UTM”.

So, UTM parameters are things you put on the end of a link to your website, so that when someone visits that link, those parameters get passed into your analytics and recorded. You can then see how many people came from that specific source.

Important note: UTM links are designed to be used when people are clicking from another site, or an email, to your website – they’re not designed to be used within your own website, so you wouldn’t use them to see who clicks from your home page to your about page.

Google have a handy tool that lets you create a UTM link, but to be honest, once you’ve done it once, you can probably just keep updating the same one. I personally have a post-it note on my desk to remind me what to write! It simply says 

?utm_source=18ablog

(But I change the “18ablog” part to whatever I want to have as the source.)

How to use Google’s UTM campaign builder tool

Google’s Campaign URL builder is here and looks like this:

All you need to do, is enter your URL in the top box – this is the exact page you want to link to, not just your home page. So if you’re creating an ad, or a LinkedIn post and it’s going to https://your-website.com/your-latest-blog-post you put all of that into the top box. As it says on the form, it needs the full URL which includes https:// .

Google say you need 3 parameters at least – so on this form they mark campaign source, campaign medium, and campaign name as required fields and you won’t be able to build a URL, with this form, without them. BUT I don’t think you actually need all of them. Google say that without those 3 you won’t be able to run proper analysis, but if you’re just using this once in a while to see where clicks come from, then just putting ?utm_source=SOMETHING is going to still help. So create the massive long link they require – and then remove any bits you want, or just amend it in the future to be shorter. Or remember my post-it note and don’t use the tool at all.

Once you’ve filled in the required fields on the form, just under where that screenshot ends a URL will appear. And it’ll look something like:

https://www.18aproductions.co.uk/2025/12/18/the-big-site-builder-comparison-report-of-2026/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=talkingweb&utm_id=123&utm_term=creator&utm_content=v1

That URL is then what you use to link to your web page. In the case of the URL above, I’d use it to link from my email newsletter because I’ve said:

URL is https://www.18aproductions.co.uk/2025/12/18/the-big-site-builder-comparison-report-of-2026
Source: newsletter
Medium: email
Campaign: talkingweb
ID: 123
Term: Creator
Content: v1

But like I keep saying, you don’t need to have all the parameters (each &utm_something=something is called a parameter).

Where to see UTM parameters in GA4

Now, it’s all very well passing all of these parameters into GA4 – but where do you find them in there? Well, there are 2 places, depending on what you’re trying to find out.

Traffic acquisition report

From the left hand side menu of Google Analytics 4 (which might be condensed and only showing icons, but click on it and it’ll open up) click on Reports (the 2nd icon). From there, click Acquisition and then Traffic acquisition.

Scroll down to the table of results (below the chart, usually, unless you’ve customised loads of stuff) and find the tiny little drop down that says “Session primary… Channel Group)”. Click on that and select “Session source”. Then, if you set a “source” in your UTM links, and anyone visited your site via one of those links, it should be recorded here.

If you want to get technical, you can then click the blue + icon to add other things to check against so you’re building a query of “where they came via this source, but via this medium”.

Audience acquisition report

Whilst your traffic acquisition report tells you, well, traffic acquisition, your audience acquisition report tells you where a user first came from. So if you want to see how people are visiting your site for the first time, go to the Audience report. If you want to see how people are coming to your site, whether they’ve been before or not, head to the Traffic report.

Once you’re in the Audience traffic acquisition report, just look for the same little drop down as shown above.

If you can’t see any results on either report when you change the drop down, double check you’ve set your UTM links up properly, check you actually used them where you meant to, and then consider if people are actually being tracked by your GA4. By that last point I mean…

Don’t forget cookies

Hello again Cookie Law, our old friend. (I’m all for privacy, genuinely, but the cookie law is a bit simplistic and doesn’t really stop anyone getting stuff if they want it – so really it’s just an added expense for companies and a tax on honest people.)

Remember that if you’ve got a correctly configured cookie tool, then GA4 won’t load for anyone who doesn’t accept cookies. So you won’t have their numbers in your GA4. And you therefore won’t have their clicks in your report.

If you want to grab UTMs without cookies, then your developer can do this – it is possible to make a web page grab and record the UTM parameters it’s visited with, but I’ve never known a website do this by default. So it’d have to be something you get developed. We do it on our own tools such as sitevitals.co.uk so we know what’s working.

Doing it without cookies means you know about that first page they land on, but you might want your developer to do it with some first-party cookies too, for your own conversion tracking, so you can pass the message about the UTM parameters all the way through until someone completes a transaction so you know which sign ups / purchases relate to which traffic source.

Another option is to use a locally installed version of Matomo, an analytics tool – then you’re not using cookies (if you use their cookieless settings) and you’re not working with 3rd parties and instead you have your own personal GA4 which can record your UTM parameter visits.

If you’d like to chat about us setting you up with Matomo, or bespoke UTM tracking, just get in touch.