How To Track Campaigns In GA4 Using UTM Parameters

Helping You Level Up Your Analytics and Digital Marketing Skills

Hi! I’m Dana, Founder & Lead Instructor at KP Playbook. For more than 20 years, I’ve helped top brands and agencies refine their analytics and reporting practices, and provide targeted training in GA4, GTM, and Looker Studio. One of the most common issues that I run into again and again is great performing website traffic that isn’t attributed correctly. This guide will help you improve your UTM tracking strategy—or get you started on using UTMs if you haven’t done that before.

If you have more questions after reading this guide, please get in touch!

As a busy professional, you’re juggling multiple campaigns across various marketing channels—newsletters, emails, social posts, ads, and more. Driving traffic to your website, converting visitors to customers, and growing your sales are all critical to your overall marketing success.

You need to know how someone got to your website and how Key Events and Conversions are credited to your different marketing channels, which is known as attribution. This is where UTM parameters shine.

UTM parameters tell GA4 how to sort your traffic sources. When you don’t implement UTM parameters into your marketing campaigns, GA4 makes a best guess as to where the traffic belongs—which can result in poor attribution, or in some cases, no attribution at all. Without UTM parameters, you can end up with far more traffic in the Direct channel than you should!

The Problem with Direct Traffic

Many people think of direct traffic as bookmarks or people typing in a URL directly and both of those can absolutely show up as direct traffic. But there are many other sources of direct traffic, including:

• Visits from some social media sites or apps—some will let GA4 know where the visitor came from, other sites or apps remove any referrer information or don’t provide enough referrer information for GA4 to attribute the visit properly.
• A link click or tap from a chat message, such as in Slack or iMessage.
• A visitor who is coming back to a tab they’ve had open for many months.

Direct traffic is any traffic that arrives on a site without any referrer information. If a link has UTM parameters, GA4 uses the parameters to categorize your traffic. Referrer information won’t affect traffic categorization when UTM parameters are present.

UTM parameters help you track traffic that would otherwise be untrackable!

GA4 automatically sorts traffic into channels based on a series of rules that it’s programmed to follow, which make up its default channel groupings. Channel groupings are rules-based categories that help you track the performance of all the channels sending traffic to your website. Many of these rules rely on referrer information, ad network information, or UTM parameters.

GA4’s Default Channel Groupings

UTM parameters have been around a long time—they originated in a tool called Urchin Analytics, which Google bought in 2005 and rebranded as Google Analytics. UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module”.

You’ve probably seen UTM parameters in use quite often. A URL with UTM parameters looks something like this:

That example link was in the description of one of our YouTube videos, and we wanted to know how many people clicked that specific link, so we added UTM parameters. Both utm_source and utm_medium are required, all of the other parameters are optional.

UTM Parameter Breakdown

Why is there a First User Source/Medium, a Session Source/Medium, and just Source/Medium in GA4?

GA4 groups information into what they call scopes. A scope outlines a specific level of information—user, session, or event. Scopes are tough to get your mind around, so let’s start with an analogy.

Think of it this way: you have a neighborhood. In that neighborhood, there are many houses. In each house, there are many rooms. Say you want to report on the postal codes for various neighborhoods—would it make sense to have a list of the rooms and then the postal codes for each? Definitely not, that’s at the neighborhood level. What about the temperature you set your house thermostat at? You could have an average of all the thermostats for the neighborhood, but if you reported that information on a room-level basis, you’d end up just repeating the same number multiple times.

Now let’s take this analogy back to GA4. Users are neighborhoods 🏙️, sessions are houses 🏡, and rooms 🛋️ are events. A user can have one or more sessions, and a session can have multiple events.

Why does this matter when it comes to reporting on where your traffic is coming from? That’s because these scope levels also impact the attribution data that GA4 gives you.

1. The user scope 🏙️ (neighborhood) results in the First User dimension. This is the very first way that a user gets to your website.
2. The session scope 🏡 (house) gives you the Session dimension (also found in the Traffic Acquisition report to make it extra confusing). This is how a user got to your website in their most recent session. Remember as well that if a user has only visited your website once, their First User and Session values will be the same!
3. The event scope 🛋️ (room) is the unnamed dimension (e.g. “source/medium” as opposed to “session source/medium”). GA4 only uses this to report on key events/conversions, and this data isn’t available for sessions that didn’t have key event/convert. (Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what scope should you use when you’re looking at reports in GA4?

• First User works well if you don’t have a lot of repeat visitors to your website, or if you want to look at only the very first touchpoint a visitor had with your website.
• Session (also named Traffic in GA4) is a popular option and works well when you want to evaluate the most recent session channels for your visitors.
• Event is only recorded when a key event is recorded—this likely isn’t useful unless you’re deep-diving into key event data and trying to see how accurate it is. Which honestly, we don’t recommend. Analytics data just isn’t accurate enough to warrant that level of scrutiny.

We recommend following these best practices when creating your UTM parameters:

1. Pick a letter case and stick to it. GA4 is case-sensitive, so if you use both Facebook and facebook in a utm_source parameter, that traffic will not be grouped together. Lowercase is what we typically recommend, but there are some exceptions where Google will use title case (e.g. “Shopping Free Listings” in the Source Platform).
2. Don’t use spaces. We recommend replacing any spaces with the + symbol, which turns into a space in the GA4 interface. It’s fine to use dashes or underscores as well, whatever works best for you!
3. Be consistent. Use our UTM Tagging Tool spreadsheet below and make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page about what UTM parameters to use in your traffic tracking.
4. Don’t make your URLs too long. URLs have a limit of 2048 characters—make sure that your URL with your UTMs added on isn’t longer than that!

Not a Fan of Long URLs? No Problem—Use Tracking URLs Instead!

A tracking URL is a website address that when visited, redirects you to a different URL with UTM parameters appended.

• This traffic would end up in the Audio channel as the utm_medium is set to “audio”.
• The utm_source parameter indicates which podcast we were on.
• The utm_campaign to indicate it was a specific tracking URL.

When you use a tracking URL, you can mention/share the URL where you’re using it, in this case, it was shared on a podcast (example: “For more information, visit kpplaybook.com/podcastexample”) and then you’ll know how many people actually went to that page via that podcast episode, instead of saying just the name of your site and hoping you can figure out how people found you or which podcast appearance was the most effective.

Did you know you can create your own custom channels?

You can create up to 2 additional custom channel groups using your own rules for traffic so you can tailor GA4 to your needs (if you pay for GA4 360 you can get up to 5 different custom channel groups in total).

How can you decide if you need a custom channel group? Consider the sources of traffic that you get to your website. Is there a specific source that you want to break out further? For example, let’s say that you’re a business with one or more physical locations and you spend a lot of time and effort on your Google Business Profile listings. You want to break out your Google Business Profile listing traffic separately from the default “Organic Search” channel that is built into GA4. That’s a great opportunity to use a custom channel group.

Learn more about creating your own custom channel groups.

If you decide to create your own custom channel group, you need to make sure that you always use the new custom channel group instead of the default group by using the Primary Channel Group feature in GA4. Otherwise, you’ll need to manually select your new channel group every time you want to use it in a report, or edit your acquisition reports to use the new channel group by default. If GA4’s default channel groups work well for you, that’s great! You don’t need to change anything.

If you do want to change the Primary Channel Group, after you’ve created your custom channel group, go to Admin > Channel Groups, and click on the pencil icon in the Primary Channel Group box, then select your new channel group.

Unassigned Traffic

If you’re seeing Unassigned traffic in the acquisition report in GA4 (formally known as (Other) in Universal Analytics) this channel represents traffic that doesn’t correspond with any of GA4’s channel definitions and their predefined rules.

The important thing to remember when it comes to channel definitions is that there is no room for error—GA4 is so specific that it’s even case-sensitive. For example, if you had some traffic tagged with the medium ‘social’ (all lowercase), and then another with the medium ‘Social’ with a capital S, the lowercase ‘social’ would end up in the Organic Social channel, while the capitalized ‘Social’ would be categorized under Unassigned. To us, yes, it is the same word—but to GA4 it absolutely is not.

How to diagnose Unassigned traffic in GA4

Quickly identify if you have an Unassigned traffic issue with our GA4 Audit Dashboard. Watch this video to learn how to use the tool and learn more about the dreaded Unassigned traffic channel.

Referrer Information

When you click on a link from one website to go to another website, typically your visit also includes something called the “referrer.” This is the URL that you were on before you visited this page.

For example, if you clicked a link on Google search to get to this article, your referrer would be https://www.google.com/ and the destination site would be able to read this information to determine where you came from.

GA4 also reads that information and then makes a decision on how that traffic should be categorized as a result, unless there was also ad network information or UTMs present.

Ad Network Information

Have you ever noticed that when you click a Google ad, you see a bunch of random characters at the end of the URL, that could look like this:

That “gclid” part tells GA4 that this visit was via an ad, and details are encoded in that URL on exactly how that ad was generated—was it a display ad, was it on Google search, and so on. This information then tells GA4 how to categorize this visit in their various ad-related channel categories. Other ad networks do something similar—for example, if you click an ad on Facebook, you’ll see “fbclid” in the URL—GA4 knows what networks to watch for and how to categorize the resulting traffic.

If GA4 doesn’t know how to categorize the traffic, that is where UTM parameters come into play.

The purpose of using UTM parameters is to track the success of your marketing campaigns, so it’s important to make sure that you’re able to view your results in GA4. Let’s dive into reporting and start drawing insights from your various campaign tracking.

While the goal of each campaign will differ slightly, at the end of the day you’ll want to know:

• How much traffic did my campaign generate?
• Did that traffic turn into conversions/key events?
  • How many people signed up for our newsletter?
  • How many form submissions were there?
  • Did any visitors make a purchase?
• Did visitors engage with my content? (Content Consumption)

If you haven’t already set up your reports in GA4 to look at this information, then you will need to make some tweaks. Your UTM data can be viewed in the Acquisition reports called User Acquisition and Traffic Acquisition.

You can find those reports in the Reports option, then look for Life Cycle > Acquisition, or under Business Objectives > Generate Leads. The option(s) you’ll see will depend on the options you picked when setting up your GA4 property, and whether or not you’ve customized your reports.

The User acquisition report focuses on the very first way that a visitor got to your website.

You can find this report in GA4 under the Reports option, then look under Life Cycle > Acquisition, or Business Objectives > Leads. You might see different options if you’ve already customized your GA4 reports.

If you want to view a different dimension, such as the Campaigns that brought people to your website on their first visit, click the drop down arrow in the first column, and then select the dimension you want to view, such as First User Campaign.

Or, you can add Campaign as a secondary dimension so you can view both the Channel and then the Campaigns that are associated with that Channel.

To view that, click the + symbol, then click Traffic Source > First User Campaign.

The Traffic acquisition report focuses on the most recent traffic source that led a visitor to your website.

You can find this report in GA4 under the Reports option, then look under Life Cycle > Acquisition, or Business Objectives > Leads. You might see different options if you’ve already customized your GA4 reports.

If you want to view a different dimension, such as the Campaigns that brought people to your website on their most recent visit, click the drop down arrow in the first column, and then select the dimension you want to view, such as Session Campaign.

Or, you can add Campaign as a secondary dimension so you can view both the Channel and then the Campaigns that are associated with that Channel.

To view that, click the + symbol, then click Traffic Source > Session Campaign.

Breaking Out Key Events

In your User Acquisition and Traffic Acquisition reports, you’ll have a metric of “Key Events” (used to be called Conversions) by default. You might need to scroll to the right of your report to view it.

Once you’ve found that metric, there is a drop down menu under the metric name. Click that drop down, and you’ll see all the Key Events in your GA4 property.

You can select one of these Key Events (but not more than one) to view the data for just that Key Event.

Filtering Acquisition Reports

You can also filter either of your acquisition reports by a specific campaign (or any other UTM value!). Filters are available on most reports, not just the acquisition reports. To add a filter:

1. Click the “Add filter” button at the top of the report. The Build Filter panel will slide in on the right.
2. Select a Dimension—for example, Session Campaign.
3. Select a match type. There are lots of match type options, but if you select “exactly matches” you can then see a list of potential values to pick from.
4. Enter or select your Value.
5. Optionally, click “+ Add new condition” to make your filter more specific.
6. Click “Apply”.

Easily generate UTM-tagged URLs to track marketing campaigns in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Our free UTM Builder & Tracker simplifies campaign tracking by automatically adding UTM parameters to your URLs—ensuring traffic is properly attributed to the right channels.

Just enter your campaign details (Destination URL, Medium, and Source), and your UTM-tagged URL will be generated instantly. Use our Google Sheets UTM tracker to keep your team organized and monitor all your campaigns in one place.

Say goodbye to Direct or Unassigned traffic—with accurate UTM tracking, you’ll gain clearer insights into campaign performance and make data-informed decisions with confidence.

Start Tracking Smarter Today

Analytics will never be perfect, but you can improve your reporting and attribution by incorporating UTM parameters into your marketing processes and by consistently following these best practices.

UTM parameters are just one small piece of your analytics tracking and reporting puzzle. If you’re just starting out on your analytics journey or are struggling to build confidence with GA4 we have a Google Analytics 4 course that will help you level up your skills.

If you want to become an analytics expert and build out your services while learning more about Google Analytics, Looker Studio, Google Tag Manager, check out our Analytics for Agencies course.

If you have questions about tracking or analytics, connect with me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, or YouTube. I’m always happy to help!

Created by: Dana DiTomaso 
Founder & Lead Instructor, KP Playbook