"Where did this visit come from" has two very different levels of answer. Without tagging, the best you get is a category: Direct, Organic, Social, Referral (see our traffic sources guide for how that's decided). With a tagged link, you get the actual answer: "this specific visit came from the third link in Tuesday's newsletter," not just "something referred them."
What a UTM parameter actually is
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, named after the analytics company Google acquired to build Google Analytics, the name stuck around even though the company didn't. In practice it's just a few specific query string parameters you add to the end of a URL:
https://example.com/pricing?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=august_launchThe five standard ones:
utm_source: where it's from (newsletter, twitter, producthunt)utm_medium: what kind of channel (email, social, cpc)utm_campaign: which specific push (august_launch, black_friday)utm_content,utm_term: optional, for A/B testing link variants or ad keywords
How SimpleStat handles this
The tracking snippet sends whatever query string is present on the page a visitor lands on, verbatim, into the Campaign tab. That means full UTM strings work exactly as shown above, but you don't need the full five-parameter convention if you don't want it, a plain ?ref=indiepage or ?via=newsletter shows up just as clearly. Use whatever's simplest for your own tracking, the Campaign tab just reflects what's actually on the link.
A practical tagging convention
If you want the full UTM structure, a workable default:
- Newsletter:
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=YYYY-MM-DD(dated, so each send is distinct) - Social post:
?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch_week - Paid ad:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=brand_search - Someone else's link to you (a podcast show note, a partner's blog post):
?ref=podcastnameis usually enough, you're just trying to tell it apart from organic mentions
Keep campaign values consistent (lowercase, underscores, no spaces) so the same campaign doesn't fragment into five near-identical entries in the Campaign tab because of casing differences.
Common mistakes
Tagging your own internal links. A UTM-tagged link from your homepage to your own pricing page will attribute that click as a "new session" from that campaign, since the query string persists and gets picked up. Only tag links that live outside your own site.
Forgetting mobile share links. If a link gets shared further (someone copies your tagged URL and re-shares it), your tags travel with it, sometimes helpful, sometimes noise if you didn't intend that link to be re-shared widely. There's no way to prevent this, it's just worth knowing.
Over-tagging everything. Not every link needs a UTM. Save it for cases where you specifically want to compare performance across variants or channels, like two versions of a tweet, or three different partner mentions. For a simple "we posted this on Twitter" you probably already know it's Twitter from the Referrer tab without tagging anything.
Where to see the results
Campaign tags show up in the Campaign tab, right alongside Channel and Referrer, with the same session-based first-touch attribution, whatever tag was on the link that started the session gets credited, not every page the visitor happened to view afterward.