When you send a newsletter, the people who click its links arrive on your site with no label. Many email apps pass no referrer at all, so the visits land in direct, mixed in with everyone who typed your address. Social apps and messaging apps do the same. You know the campaign went out, and you can’t see what it brought.

UTM parameters fix that. They’re labels you add to the end of a link, and analytics tools read them when the visit arrives. Tag the link once, and every visit from it is credited to the campaign you named.

The three parameters that matter

A UTM link is your normal address with a few utm_ parameters added after a question mark:

https://example.com/spring-guide/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring-guide

utm_source is where the link was placed: the newsletter, Facebook, a partner’s site.

utm_medium is the kind of channel: email, social, cpc for paid ads, referral for a partner.

utm_campaign is the push it belongs to, such as a product launch or a seasonal sale.

Two more exist, utm_term and utm_content, for paid search keywords and for telling apart two links in the same email. Vireo records the first three.

Start from the exact page you want people to land on, then add the tags:

  1. Copy the page’s address, including the trailing slash if your site uses one.
  2. Add ? if the address has no question mark yet, or & if it already does.
  3. Add utm_source=, utm_medium= and utm_campaign=, separated by &.
  4. Open the finished link in a private window to check it lands on the right page.

For a newsletter, a social post and a partner’s mention of the same launch:

https://example.com/launch/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=autumn-launch
https://example.com/launch/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=autumn-launch
https://example.com/launch/?utm_source=partner-blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=autumn-launch

The campaign stays the same and the source changes, so you can compare channels within one campaign. Google’s Campaign URL Builder fills in the parameters for you if you’d rather not type them, and most email tools can add them to every link in a send automatically.

The mistakes that spoil the numbers

Inconsistent spelling. newsletter, news-letter and email-newsletter are three different sources as far as a report is concerned, and Vireo stores the tags as they arrive without tidying them. Many tools also treat Newsletter and newsletter as different, so stick to lowercase. Pick hyphens, write the list down, and reuse it.

Spaces and odd characters. A space in a tag becomes %20 or + in the address and turns the report into a puzzle. Use hyphens instead: autumn-launch, not autumn launch.

Tagging your own internal links. UTM tags are for links that bring people to your site from outside. A tagged link in your own menu or sidebar says a visitor came from a campaign when they were already on the site. In Vireo, the campaign is taken from the first page of a visit, so internal tags add nothing.

Leaving out the medium. A link with a source but no medium has no channel. The UTM campaigns card shows it with the medium blank. For revenue, Vireo works the channel out from the referring site if there is one, and otherwise files the sale under the medium “campaign”. Setting the medium yourself keeps both reports tidy.

Links that lose their tags. Some link shorteners, redirects and form tools drop everything after the question mark. Click the finished link, wherever it ends up being posted, and check the address bar still shows the tags when the page loads.

Tags on links you don’t control. You can’t tag a link someone else writes about you. Those visits arrive with the other site as the referrer, which is fine: Vireo’s referrer reports show them without any tags.

Where the results show up in Vireo

UTM reports are part of Vireo Pro. With Pro active, open Vireo Analytics and switch to the Campaigns tab. The UTM campaigns card lists each Source, Medium and Campaign with the Visitors and Pageviews it brought, for whatever date range you’ve picked.

Tagged visits are added to the card once the visit has wound down, usually within about half an hour, when WordPress runs its scheduled tasks. A link you just clicked to test won’t show up straight away.

If your site sells through WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, FluentCart or Freemius, the same tags follow the visitor to checkout. Under Vireo Analytics, Revenue, the top revenue sources table shows Source, Medium and Campaign with the orders and revenue each one led to. For a shop, that table is the campaign’s real result. Which page made the sale? explains how a sale is matched to the visit that started it, and where that matching stops.

The free version still records where every visit came from by referring site, so a campaign posted on another site shows up under its domain in the referrer list. The referrer directory explains the common ones.

A naming scheme you’ll still understand next year

Keep it boring and consistent:

  • Source: the place, in lowercase. newsletter, facebook, linkedin, partner-name.
  • Medium: one of a short fixed list. email, social, cpc, referral.
  • Campaign: what you were promoting and when. autumn-launch, black-friday-2026, spring-guide.

Write the scheme down where everyone who sends links can find it, so two people never tag the same newsletter two different ways.