UTM generator: a free UTM builder for campaign URLs

What is a UTM generator?

A UTM generator is a tool that adds UTM parameters to a link. You give it a website URL and a few values, such as the source, medium and campaign, and it returns one tagged URL to use in an ad, email or post. When someone clicks it, analytics reads the values and reports the visit under that campaign.

UTM builder, UTM link generator and campaign URL builder are names for the same thing: Google calls its own the Campaign URL Builder. The link is nothing special. UTM parameters are ordinary query parameters, added after a question mark and separated by ampersands, as Google's Analytics help page on campaign URLs describes. The generator puts a link together like this:

tagged URL = website URL
           + ?  (or & when the URL already has a query string)
           + utm_source=...&utm_medium=...&utm_campaign=...
           + #fragment, if the URL had one

How to use the UTM generator

1. Paste the website URL. The exact page the link should open. Leave any query string or #fragment in place.
2. Enter the source. Where the click comes from, such as google, newsletter or linkedin.
3. Enter the medium. How the link is delivered, such as cpc, email or social. The channel line in the result says what Google's default channel rules make of it.
4. Name the campaign. One name for the whole promotion, the same in every channel.
5. Add content or a term if they help. Content tells two links in the same campaign apart. Term is the paid keyword.
6. Copy the tagged URL and test it. Open it once and check that the page loads and the parameters are still in the address bar.

The clean-up option is on by default. It lowercases the values and turns spaces into hyphens, because Google treats Email and email as two different values and recommends lowercase. It lists every change it makes, and it never touches a campaign ID, a source platform or a placeholder. Hyphen is the default separator for a reason: it keeps Google's own medium names intact. "Social media" becomes social-media, which is on Google's Organic Social list, while social_media is not. Turn the option off if your convention uses capitals.

By Kurt Philip, Founder

UTM link examples: four cases a builder has to get right

A UTM link is the website URL, a question mark, then the parameters joined by ampersands. Most links are that simple. The four cases below are the ones that go wrong when links are tagged by hand. Each result was built by the same code as the tool above, and the addresses and names are made up.

A URL that already has a query string and a fragment

Start with a link that already carries a color filter, an old utm_source and a #reviews fragment:

https://www.example.com/shoes?color=blue&utm_source=old-campaign#reviews

Tagged for an unpaid Instagram post, it becomes:

https://www.example.com/shoes?color=blue&utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer-launch#reviews

The color filter is kept. The old utm_source is replaced, not repeated. The new parameters are joined with an ampersand because the question mark is already there. The fragment stays last, because everything written after a # is part of the fragment, not the query string.

Spaces, an ampersand and an accented letter

A campaign called "Café & Bar Launch" cannot go into a URL as typed: the ampersand would be read as the start of another parameter. With the clean-up option off, the builder percent-encodes the value as Caf%C3%A9%20%26%20Bar%20Launch. Each space becomes %20, the ampersand %26 and the é %C3%A9. With clean-up on, it is lowercased and the spaces become hyphens first, giving caf%C3%A9-%26-bar-launch, which Analytics reads back as café-&-bar-launch.

A URL typed without https://

Type www.example.com/sale and the builder adds the scheme and says so:

https://www.example.com/sale?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring-sale

In a web page, a link without a scheme is read as a path on the current site, so it would not open yours.

A placeholder the ad platform fills in

Google's help page suggests dynamic values such as utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}, so the campaign name never has to be typed by hand. A placeholder only works if it reaches the ad platform untouched, so the builder leaves curly-brace placeholders unencoded and never lowercases them:

https://www.example.com/sale?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}

Placeholder names differ by ad platform. Take them from the platform's own documentation.

Common UTM mistakes and how to avoid them

The most common UTM mistakes are tagging links between your own pages, spelling the same value more than one way, swapping source and medium, and using a medium that Google's channel rules do not recognize. None of them breaks the link. Each one quietly puts visits in the wrong row of a report, where the error is hard to spot later.

Never put UTM parameters on internal links

UTM parameters answer one question: how did this visitor reach the site? A tag on a banner, menu or button inside your own site overwrites the original source where it matters most. Google's documentation on campaigns and traffic sources says campaign values that arrive in the middle of a session are attached to the events that follow and used for event-based attribution. The sale is then credited to your homepage banner, not to the ad or email that brought the visitor. Measure internal banners and buttons with events instead.

Other mistakes the generator checks for

• Mixed case and spaces. Email, email and e mail are three values. With clean-up off, the generator warns about capitals and spaces.
• Source and medium swapped. The source names the sender (google), the medium the method (cpc). The generator flags a source such as cpc and a medium such as facebook.
• A medium outside Google's rules. A medium such as newsletter or social_media matches no rule, so the visits can land in Unassigned. The channel line names the value Google expects.
• An ad medium that is not paid. Google's paid pattern matches a medium that contains cp, such as cpc, the mediums ppc and retargeting, and any medium that starts with paid. It does not match remarketing, so an ad tagged google and remarketing falls under the Organic Search rule.
• The word shop in a campaign name. Google's Shopping channel rules look for shop or shopping in the campaign name. The generator says when a name will match.
• Values pasted already encoded. A value such as spring%20sale is encoded a second time and would show in reports with the code in it.

Mistakes no tool can catch

• Personal data in a value. UTM values sit in the address bar and are stored in analytics. Never put a name, an email address or a customer ID in one.
• A redirect that drops the query string. If the link passes through a redirect, click the finished link and check that the parameters are still in the address bar on the landing page.
• Relying on hand tags for Google Ads. Google Ads tags its own clicks with a gclid parameter, and Google says GA4 gives that auto-tagging priority over manual tags. UTMs there are a fallback, not a replacement.