A simple naming system for campaign links.

Give each field one job

Source identifies where the link is being shared. Medium identifies the kind of channel. Campaign groups links from the same publishing effort. Google’s campaign documentation describes how these parameters are used by Analytics; the naming system below is an editorial convention you can adopt, not a required standard.

For a newsletter, you could use source=twicf, medium=email and campaign=edition-001. Use a content value only when you need to distinguish placements, such as lead-story and footer. Keep a small reference sheet with these names so another person can build the next link consistently.

Build one complete example

Fictional destination: https://example.com/guide?lang=en#checklist. Add utm_source=twicf, utm_medium=email, utm_campaign=edition-001 and utm_content=lead-story. The existing lang parameter and checklist fragment should remain.

Our campaign link builder preserves non-UTM parameters and the fragment. Open the resulting link yourself and check that it reaches the intended section. A syntactically valid URL can still point to the wrong article, an unpublished page or a sign-in screen.

Avoid names that reveal more than intended

Campaign tags are visible in URLs. Someone can copy, forward or record the link. Use a public campaign label, not a person’s email address, an internal customer identifier or a private project name.

Choose one spelling and case for recurring values. “Email”, “email” and “e-mail” make the same channel harder to compare. A convention such as lowercase words joined with hyphens is easy to explain. If a campaign already exists, follow its established convention rather than splitting it halfway through.

Understand what the link does not measure

A tagged link labels a visit for a compatible measurement system. It does not collect a click count by itself. Our builder does not install analytics, fetch the destination or send its inputs to a server. This publication currently has no analytics script.

Even with analytics configured, attribution is an interpretation of recorded activity. Forwarded links and unavailable measurements can complicate it. Keep reports modest: a tagged visit is not proof that someone read an article, liked it or became a customer.

Before the link leaves your draft

• Match the source, medium and campaign to your reference sheet.
• Keep optional content labels specific to the placement.
• Remove private information from every parameter.
• Check the destination, existing parameters and fragment.
• Test the final link in the actual draft you will publish.

Use this next

• Build your campaign link