Garbage In, Garbage Out

Analytics is only as good as the data you feed it. If your input tags (UTMs) are messy, your reports will be useless.

Here are the 5 most common ways marketers destroy their own data, and how to stop doing it.

1. Tagging Internal Links

The Mistake: Placing a UTM link on your homepage banner pointing to your own product page. yoursite.com -> yoursite.com/product?utm_source=banner

The Consequence: You overwrite the original source. If a user came from Google (Organic), and clicks that banner, Analytics now says they came from "banner" (Referral). You lost the credit for your SEO efforts.

The Fix: Never use UTMs internally. Use 'onClick' events or dedicated internal promotion tracking in GA4.

2. Inconsistent Naming (The Case of Case)

The Mistake:

• Monday: utm_source=LinkedIn
• Tuesday: utm_source=linkedin

The Consequence: GA4 sees two different sources. Your data is split.

The Fix: Always use lowercase. Our UTM Builder handles this for set presets.

3. Using Spaces

The Mistake: utm_campaign=summer sale 2024 The Consequence: URLs might break in emails or turn into ugly %20 strings. The Fix: Use underscores (summer_sale_2024) or dashes (summer-sale-2024).

4. Confusing Medium and Source

The Mistake: utm_source=cpc & utm_medium=google The Consequence: This is backwards. Source is Who (Google), Medium is How (CPC). The Fix: Think "Source = Name" and "Medium = Channel".

5. Over-Tagging (PII Risk)

The Mistake: [email protected] The Consequence: Sending Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to Google Analytics is a violation of Terms of Service. Your account could be banned. The Fix: Use anonymous IDs (e.g., user_id_12345) if you must track individuals, but generally, track cohorts not people in public URLs.

Build It Right Every Time

Manual tagging leads to typos. Typos lead to bad data. Bad data leads to bad decisions.

Use a standardized builder effectively.

Create Clean UTMs Now →