What Are UTM Parameters, and Why Don't Your Sales Match Your Dashboard?

Have you ever seen plenty of sales on your website, but when you open your ad dashboard the numbers don't match? One reason is not setting up UTM parameters correctly. UTMs are short tags added to the end of a URL to tell your analytics system which channel, campaign and type of media a visitor came from.

There are 5 main UTM values: source (such as facebook), medium (the media type, such as cpc or email), campaign (the campaign name), plus term and content, which distinguish individual ads from each other. If naming isn't systematic from the start, the data gets mixed up and becomes hard to analyse.

Set UTM naming rules the whole team follows, such as always using lowercase, and keep a central sheet you can check back on. When the data is clean at the source, analysing which channel is most cost-effective instantly becomes more accurate.

You don't need to type UTMs by hand every time. Use Google's Campaign URL Builder, or create a Google Sheet template where the team only fills in the campaign name and a formula builds the URL automatically, reducing errors from typos or inconsistent spelling between team members.