UTM builder — free campaign URL builder with naming rules

Quick answer: fill in the URL and the three required parameters and copy a clean, tagged link. Values are lowercased and hyphenated as you type — that single habit is what stops one campaign appearing as four rows in your analytics.

The five parameters

The first three are what nearly every report groups by. The last two only earn their place when you are running paid search or A/B testing two links in the same send.

Consistency beats correctness

There is no official list of valid values. email and e-mail are both "right", and that is exactly the problem: analytics groups on exact strings, so a team that uses both sees one channel as two, each with half the numbers. Pick a convention, write it down, and apply it mechanically. Lowercase-and-hyphenate is the usual choice because it removes the two decisions people get wrong most — capitalisation and spaces.

This tool applies that normalisation as you type rather than warning you afterwards, on the theory that a rule you cannot forget beats a rule you must remember.

Never put UTMs on internal links

Tagging a link from your own homepage to your own collection page does two harmful things: it restarts the session in most analytics tools, so the original source is overwritten and the visit is credited to yourself; and it creates a second crawlable URL for a page that already had one.

If you want to know which internal element gets clicked, use an analytics event. UTMs are for traffic arriving from outside.

Keeping tagged URLs out of the index

Tagged links get shared, linked and occasionally crawled. Two defences, both cheap:

• Self-referencing canonical on every page, pointing at the clean URL. Any tagged variant Google crawls then consolidates back to one URL. This is standard on Shopify themes but worth verifying — see Shopify canonical tags.
• Do not link to tagged URLs from your sitemap or navigation. The sitemap should only ever list canonical, parameter-free URLs.

With both in place, parameter URLs are a reporting detail rather than a duplicate content problem.