UTM (Urchin Tracking Module): Definition and Meaning

What does UTM stand for?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and yes, almost nobody knows that, even among marketers who use UTMs every single day.

The name comes from Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego-based web analytics company founded in the late 1990s. Urchin built one of the first widely adopted web analytics platforms, and their URL tracking parameter format (the ?utm_source=... you see appended to links everywhere) became the standard way to track marketing campaign performance.

In April 2005, Google acquired Urchin Software.¹ The product was rebranded as Google Analytics and released as a free tool later that year.

What are UTM parameters?

UTM parameters are query string tags appended to a URL that pass campaign tracking data to your analytics platform. When someone clicks a link with UTM parameters, your analytics tool (Google Analytics, HubSpot, Mixpanel, etc.) reads those tags and attributes the visit to the correct source, medium, and campaign.

Here’s what a UTM-tagged URL looks like:

https://example.com/landing-page?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=q1-product-launch&utm_content=variant-a

Without UTM parameters, your analytics platform sees incoming traffic and often has to guess where it came from. Direct traffic, “dark social” (links shared in Slack, email, or messaging apps), and referral traffic from platforms that strip referrer headers all get lumped together. UTMs eliminate the guessing.

Do UTM parameters only work with Google Analytics?

No. Despite the Google origin story, UTM parameters are not a Google-proprietary feature. They’re plain text in a URL. Any tool that can read query string parameters can read UTMs, and at this point, nearly every marketing and analytics platform does.

HubSpot automatically captures UTM values when a visitor submits a form and stores them on the contact record. Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap all parse UTM parameters from incoming URLs. Salesforce can receive UTM data passed through from your marketing automation platform. Matomo (the open-source Google Analytics alternative) reads them natively. So do Adobe Analytics, Piwik PRO, Plausible, and Fathom.

The practical takeaway: if you’re tagging your links with UTMs, that data is available everywhere in your stack, not only in Google Analytics. Your CRM, your MAP, your product analytics tool, and your ad platforms can all use the same UTM values to attribute traffic and conversions.

This also means you don’t need to pick a different tracking format if you stop using Google Analytics. The utm_ convention is the industry default. Switching analytics platforms doesn’t require re-tagging all your links.

The 5 standard UTM parameters

There are five UTM parameters. The first three are considered required by Google Analytics; the last two are optional but useful.²

1. utm_source (required)

What it tracks: Where the traffic is coming from, the specific platform, site, or publisher.

Examples: google, linkedin, newsletter, partner-blog

This answers the question: “Which website or platform sent this visitor?”

2. utm_medium (required)

What it tracks: The marketing channel or type of traffic.

Examples: cpc, social, email, referral, display

This answers: “What type of marketing effort drove this visit?” Note that Google Analytics has a set of default channel groupings that rely on consistent utm_medium values, so it’s worth using standard terms here.

3. utm_campaign (required)

What it tracks: The specific campaign name, promotion, or initiative.

Examples: q1-product-launch, black-friday-2026, webinar-series-feb

This answers: “Which campaign does this traffic belong to?”

4. utm_term (optional)

What it tracks: The paid search keyword that triggered the ad.

Examples: marketing+automation+software, crm+comparison

This was originally designed for Google Ads keyword tracking, though most advertisers now use auto-tagging (gclid) instead. Some teams repurpose utm_term for other tracking needs.

5. utm_content (optional)

What it tracks: Differentiates between multiple links within the same campaign.

Examples: header-cta, sidebar-banner, variant-a, blue-button

This is particularly useful for A/B testing ad creative or tracking which specific link in an email drove the click.

UTM naming conventions

UTMs are only useful if they’re consistent. If one person tags a LinkedIn campaign as utm_source=LinkedIn, another uses utm_source=linkedin, and a third uses utm_source=li, you now have three separate sources in your analytics that all represent the same thing.

Here’s a practical naming convention template:

Rules to live by:

• Always lowercase. UTM parameters are case-sensitive. Email and email are two different mediums in your reporting.
• Use hyphens, not spaces or underscores. Hyphens are URL-safe and readable in reports.
• Document your conventions. A shared spreadsheet or your MAP’s campaign naming taxonomy should define allowed values. If everyone invents their own, your data is useless.
• Never use UTMs on internal links. Adding UTM parameters to links within your own site resets the visitor’s source attribution, making it look like they arrived from an internal campaign rather than whatever originally brought them to your site.

How marketing ops uses UTMs

For marketing operations teams, UTM management is foundational. It’s not glamorous, but it directly determines whether your attribution reporting is trustworthy.

UTM builder tools. Most marketing ops teams maintain a UTM builder, either a Google Sheet with dropdown validation, a tool like UTM.io, or a custom solution built into their MAP. The goal is to eliminate free-text entry and enforce naming conventions.

Campaign tracking and attribution. UTMs feed into your multi-touch attribution model. First-touch attribution (which campaign first brought someone to the site) and last-touch attribution (which campaign drove the conversion) both depend on clean UTM data. If your UTMs are inconsistent, your attribution model is garbage-in, garbage-out.

Channel performance reporting. The utm_medium parameter is what lets you answer “how is our email channel performing vs. paid social vs. organic social?” Consistent medium values mean your channel reporting actually means something.

Integration with your MAP and CRM. When a lead fills out a form on a UTM-tagged landing page, most MAPs capture the UTM values and attach them to the lead record. This means you can trace a closed deal back to the specific campaign, channel, and source that generated the lead, which is how marketing proves ROI.

Common UTM mistakes

Using UTMs on organic search links. You don’t need (and shouldn’t use) UTMs for organic search traffic. Google Analytics tracks organic search automatically via the referrer header.

Tagging internal links. This is the most common mistake. If you add UTM parameters to a link on your own blog pointing to your own pricing page, you’ve just overwritten the visitor’s original source. That organic Google visitor now looks like they came from “blog-sidebar-cta” instead.

Inconsistent capitalization. utm_source=Facebook and utm_source=facebook create two separate entries in your reports. Pick lowercase and stick with it.

No documentation. Without a shared convention document, UTM values drift over time. “email” becomes “Email” becomes “email-marketing” becomes “newsletter.” Then someone has to spend a weekend cleaning up the data.

Origin and history

Urchin Software Corporation was founded by Paul Muret and Jack Ancone in San Diego. Their web analytics product, Urchin on Demand, was one of the first hosted analytics platforms and competed with tools like WebTrends and Omniture (later acquired by Adobe).

Google acquired Urchin in April 2005 for a reported $30 million. The product was relaunched as Google Analytics in November 2005 and offered for free, a move that effectively disrupted the entire web analytics market overnight. The Urchin on-premise product continued to be sold until 2012, when Google officially retired the Urchin brand.

The UTM parameter format, however, lives on. It’s been adopted as a de facto standard by virtually every analytics and marketing automation platform, regardless of whether they have any connection to Google. The letters “UTM” have outlasted the company they were named after by over a decade.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does UTM stand for?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. It's named after Urchin Software Corporation, a web analytics company that Google acquired in 2005. Urchin's technology became the foundation of Google Analytics, and the UTM parameter format became the industry standard for campaign tracking.

How many UTM parameters are there?

There are five standard UTM parameters: utm_source (where the traffic comes from), utm_medium (the marketing channel), utm_campaign (the specific campaign name), utm_term (paid search keywords), and utm_content (used for A/B testing or differentiating links within the same campaign).

Do UTM parameters only work with Google Analytics?

No. UTM parameters are plain query string text in a URL, not a Google-proprietary feature. Nearly every analytics and marketing platform reads them natively, including HubSpot, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Adobe Analytics, Matomo, Salesforce (via MAP integration), Plausible, and Fathom. If you tag your links with UTMs, that data is available across your entire marketing stack.

Do UTM parameters affect SEO?

UTM parameters should not be used on internal links within your own website. They can cause analytics issues by creating self-referral traffic and resetting the user's original source attribution. For external links pointing to your site, UTMs don't affect SEO rankings. Google ignores query parameters for indexing purposes. However, it's good practice to use canonical tags to prevent any potential duplicate content issues.