The 5 UTM Parameters Cheat Sheet (Print-Friendly)

Why A Cheat Sheet Instead Of Another Long Guide

Most people do not need a full tutorial every time they build a tagged link, they need a fast reminder of what goes where. This page is built to be scanned in under a minute, printed and taped next to a monitor, or bookmarked for the moments when you are halfway through building a campaign link and blank on which parameter handles which detail.

If you want the deeper reasoning behind each parameter, including edge cases and common mistakes, the complete guide to UTM parameters covers that ground. This page intentionally skips the explanation and sticks to definitions and examples.

utm_source: Where The Click Came From

Required. Names the specific platform or publisher sending the traffic.

Example: utm_source=newsletter identifies traffic from your email newsletter specifically, distinct from other channels.

utm_medium: What Kind Of Channel It Was

Required. Names the general category of channel, grouping multiple sources together.

Example: utm_medium=email groups your newsletter alongside any other email sends, separate from social or paid channels.

utm_campaign: What Initiative It Belongs To

Required. Names the specific marketing push the link is part of, tying multiple channels together under one label.

Example: utm_campaign=fall_product_launch groups every channel promoting that one launch, whether it's email, paid social, or organic.

utm_term: What Keyword Or Segment Triggered It

Optional. Most useful for paid search to capture the keyword that triggered the ad, or for audience segment tracking in other contexts.

Example: utm_term=running_shoes captures the search keyword driving a specific paid search ad click.

utm_content: What Version Of The Creative It Was

Optional. Distinguishes between multiple versions of the same ad, email, or link when source, medium, and campaign are otherwise identical.

Example: utm_content=header_cta versus utm_content=footer_cta separates clicks on two different links within the same email.

The Full Link, Assembled

Putting all five together on one example link: yoursite.com/landing-page?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fall_product_launch&utm_term=running_shoes&utm_content=header_cta. Each parameter is separated by an ampersand and follows the same key-value format after the initial question mark.

You rarely need all five on every link. Most day-to-day links only require source, medium, and campaign, with term and content reserved for cases where you specifically need keyword or creative-level detail.

Quick Formatting Rules To Keep In Mind

Use lowercase consistently and separate words with underscores or hyphens rather than spaces, since spaces get encoded awkwardly in URLs and break the clean, readable look of a tagged link. Stick to one separator style across your whole team rather than mixing underscores and hyphens between different campaigns.

Whether these values are treated as case sensitive by your analytics platform is a separate but related question covered fully in are UTM parameters case sensitive. The short answer for this cheat sheet is: assume case sensitivity and stay consistent to avoid the question entirely.

A Worked Example: All Five Parameters In One Campaign

Consider a real scenario: your team is running a paid LinkedIn campaign to promote a webinar, and you're testing two ad creatives while also wanting to see which specific target audience segment performs best. Here is the fully assembled link: yoursite.com/webinar-signup?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=q4_webinar_series&utm_term=demand_gen_managers&utm_content=carousel_ad_b. Each field is doing distinct work: utm_source tells you the click came from LinkedIn specifically, not just 'social' in general. utm_medium marks this as paid spend rather than an organic post, which matters when you later compare paid versus organic LinkedIn performance side by side.

utm_campaign ties this link to the same q4_webinar_series campaign name used across the accompanying email invite and retargeting ads, so all three channels roll up into one campaign report. utm_term captures the audience segment being targeted, demand_gen_managers, a repurposed use of the field outside its original paid-search-keyword role, which is a legitimate use as long as your team agrees on it consistently. utm_content distinguishes carousel_ad_b from a second creative variant, carousel_ad_a, running in the same ad set, so you can see which creative actually drove more signups once the campaign has run for a few days.

Common Mistakes With Each Parameter

The most common utm_source mistake is inconsistent naming across time, writing LinkedIn, linkedin, and Linked_In for the same platform across different campaigns, which splits what should be one data series into three. The most common utm_medium mistake is inventing a new value for every campaign instead of reusing a small, consistent set like email, cpc, paid_social, social, and referral, since medium is supposed to group traffic into broad, comparable categories, not describe each campaign uniquely.

For utm_campaign, the frequent error is letting the same initiative get slightly different names across channels, summer_sale versus summer-sale versus SummerSale, which fragments a single campaign into several disconnected reporting buckets. For utm_term, the mistake is leaving it blank on paid search campaigns where a real keyword exists to capture, missing out on keyword-level performance data the field was built for. For utm_content, the most common mistake is skipping it entirely when running an A/B test, which means both creative variants get counted together and you lose the ability to tell which one actually performed better.

A Few More Questions About These Five Parameters

Does the order of the parameters in the URL matter? No, analytics platforms read each key-value pair independently, so utm_medium can come before utm_source in the string with no difference in how the data is recorded. Do you need all five on a QR code or short link? Yes, the same five parameters apply regardless of whether the link is scanned from a QR code or clicked from a browser, since tagging happens at the URL level, not the delivery method. What if two parameters end up with the same value, like source and medium both set to email? That is fine and fairly common for simple channels like SMS or direct email sends, where there is no more specific category to separate them into.

One More Clarifying Case For Each Parameter

utm_source: what if the same piece of content gets emailed to two different lists, say an existing customer list and a cold prospect list? Use two distinct values, such as utm_source=customer_newsletter and utm_source=prospect_newsletter, rather than one generic newsletter value, since you almost always want to compare how the two audiences respond separately rather than blending them into one number.

utm_medium: what if you're unsure whether a link shared by an employee on their personal LinkedIn post counts as social or something else? The specific label matters less than picking one and applying it every time that same scenario comes up again, so the data stays comparable across every instance rather than split by whoever happened to categorize it that day.

utm_campaign: what if a single campaign runs long enough to span two distinct phases, like an initial launch followed by a later renewal push? Keep the campaign name identical if you want one combined report, or append a phase suffix like product_launch_phase2 if you specifically want the two phases broken out separately in your dashboard.

utm_term: what if you're running a display ad with no real keyword behind it? Leave utm_term out of the link entirely rather than filling it with a placeholder value like none or n/a, since a genuinely empty field is easier to interpret months later than a value that looks intentional but means nothing.

utm_content: what if you only have one version of a creative live right now? Skip utm_content until a second version actually exists to compare it against. Adding it the moment you plan an A/B test, rather than by default on every link, keeps the parameter meaningful instead of cluttering links that don't need it.

Where To Go Next

If you are building tagged links regularly enough that you want a printed reference, you are probably also at the point where a shared naming convention would save your team time. See how to create a UTM naming convention your team follows for a structured approach, or grab the free UTM naming convention template directly.

For building the links themselves without manually typing query strings, the UTM builder handles the formatting and prevents typos in parameter names, which is often the actual source of broken tracking rather than any confusion about what the parameters mean.