UTM URLs explained: how to see which ad brought the customer
Five tags on a link tell you where each customer came from. How to write them, where to use them, and mistakes that ruin your data.
You spent money on three different ads. A new customer showed up. Which ad brought them?
If you do not have a clear answer, you are not alone. Almost every company that runs ads hits this wall. There is a simple fix that costs nothing: UTM parameters.
What they are, in short
They are labels you add to the end of a link. It looks like this:
https://your-company.com/offer?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=spring-2026Everything after the ? is a label. Visitors do not see it and it does not bother them. When they land on your site, you can read it and know exactly how they got there.
The five labels
| Label | What it tells you | Example |
|---|---|---|
utm_source |
Where they came from | facebook, google, newsletter |
utm_medium |
How they came | paid, cpc, email, social |
utm_campaign |
Which campaign | spring-2026 |
utm_term |
Which keyword (for search) | accountant chicago |
utm_content |
Which ad variant | video-1, image-2 |
The first three matter most. Get those right and you are already ahead of most teams.
Where to put them
On every link you control in ads, emails, and social posts. Not on internal site links (that corrupts the data) and not on links to other websites.
Each ad gets its own link with its own labels. Three ads means three slightly different URLs.
Mistakes that ruin everything
You spell the same thing differently. “Facebook”, “facebook”, and “fb” show up as three separate sources. Pick one name and stick to it: lowercase, no spaces, use hyphens.
You forget the tags. An ad without UTMs shows up as “direct traffic” and you learn nothing. One forgotten link skews the whole picture.
You put them on internal links. If someone clicks a banner on your own site, a UTM there overwrites the real source. They came from Google, but now they look like they came from the banner.
You do not persist them anywhere. Someone lands, reads, leaves, and comes back three days later by typing your URL. The labels are gone. You need the source remembered (usually in a cookie) until they submit a form.
First touch vs last touch
Here is a common scenario. Someone sees your Google ad, then a Facebook ad, then returns directly and buys. Who gets the credit?
- First touch: Google, because it made them discover you.
- Last touch: Facebook, because it pushed them to act.
There is no single correct answer. The useful move is to see both. First touch shows what brings new people; last touch shows what closes them.
Want first and last touch for every lead?
In RIVIL CRM, source and campaign are kept automatically and show on each lead record.
A simple way to start
Keep a small spreadsheet of every link you use, with columns for source, medium, and campaign. Before you launch an ad, write the link there. After a month, you will know exactly what you ran where.
It feels tedious, but it is the difference between “I think Facebook works better” and “Facebook brought 14 customers, Google 6, and the newsletter 2”.
To avoid typing tags by hand, use our free UTM link generator: fill in the fields, it normalizes casing and spaces, and you copy the link.
For posters and business cards, do the same with a QR code generator with UTM. If a term is unclear, check the glossary.
