If you rely on campaign data to make marketing decisions, the last thing you want is inaccurate or missing UTM tags. Yet, small mistakes—like inconsistent capitalization, missing parameters, or copy-pasted links—can break your tracking and make reports messy.
A UTM audit is the best way to catch those problems before they affect your data. Let’s look at what it means and how to do it.
1. Check for Consistency
Start by reviewing how your team uses each UTM parameter.
- Source should always identify the platform (e.g.,
google,facebook,linkedin). - Medium should show the channel type (e.g.,
cpc,email,social). - Campaign should describe the initiative, not the ad itself.
Even something as simple as “Facebook” vs “facebook” creates two separate rows in your analytics. Standardizing naming conventions across teams helps you avoid this chaos.
👉 If you need a step-by-step way to standardize and enforce rules, Optizent offers resources and templates for building a consistent UTM governance process.
2. Validate Tag Accuracy
Go through a sample of live campaign links and make sure each one has valid UTM parameters. Look for:
- Missing or blank parameters
- Typos or spaces in values
- Parameters added in the wrong order (
utm_mediumbeforeutm_source) - Encoding issues (e.g.,
%20where underscores should be)
This part can get tedious, but it’s essential—every bad link means lost or misattributed traffic.
3. Confirm Data in Analytics Tools
Once links look correct, confirm that traffic is actually flowing into your analytics tool (GA4, Piwik PRO, etc.) under the right channels. Go to your Source/Medium report and spot-check if campaign data aligns with what you expect.
If you see (not set) or “other,” that’s a red flag—your UTMs might be broken or stripped by redirects.
4. Automate Audits
Doing this manually every month can be painful. A better option is to automate it.
Tools like GA Auditor can scan your website, GTM setup, and analytics data to spot UTM issues, duplicate naming, and tracking gaps—all in just a few clicks.
This saves hours of manual checking and ensures your campaign data stays clean and reliable.
In short:
UTM auditing isn’t just about fixing bad links—it’s about keeping your marketing data trustworthy. Take a few minutes to standardize, validate, and automate your tracking, and you’ll get clearer insights from every campaign.
Try GA Auditor for an easy way to uncover hidden tracking issues, and explore Optizent for in-depth analytics training and resources to take your measurement strategy further.