Campaign tracking with UTM parameters and short links

When you post the same piece to Instagram, a newsletter, and a blog at the same time, you've probably wondered which channel actually brought more people in. UTM parameters are the standard way to answer exactly that question.

What UTM parameters are

UTM parameters are tags you append to the end of an address. The analytics tool on the destination page (Google Analytics, for example) reads these tags to tell which campaign and channel a visitor came from. The five common ones are:

• utm_source — where it came from (e.g. instagram, newsletter)
• utm_medium — the medium type (e.g. social, email)
• utm_campaign — the campaign name (e.g. summer_sale)
• utm_term — keyword (mainly for search ads)
• utm_content — distinguishes variants within one campaign (e.g. top_button)

For example, the address becomes:

https://example.com/landing?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer_sale

The catch: the address gets long and ugly

Adding UTM tags makes an address long and messy fast. Pasting one straight into an Instagram profile or print material looks bad and is hard to type by hand, and a QR code made from it comes out dense.

The fix is to wrap the long UTM-laden address in a short link. UTM parameters are part of the destination address, so they're carried along intact when the short link redirects. You show people a clean short link, and the destination's analytics tool still reads the UTMs normally.

How to use it with linkpado

1. Finish the destination address with its UTM parameters. (The tags have to be on before you start.)
2. Shorten that long address with linkpado.
3. Use different UTMs per channel to make a different short link for each channel.

This gives you two layers of data:

• On the destination side: a tool like GA separates campaigns and channels by UTM.
• On the link side: linkpado counts clicks, referrers, and device and region for each short link.

Since you made a separate link per channel, just comparing linkpado's visit counts immediately shows whether the "Instagram link" or the "newsletter link" got clicked more. Reading linkpado's analytics is covered in How to read link click analytics.

Pick consistent rules

UTM values are case-sensitive — Instagram and instagram are counted as different sources. If your team uses them, agreeing on simple rules up front (lowercase only, underscores instead of spaces) saves a lot of confusion later.