UTM naming conventions for teams and agencies

As soon as more than one person builds campaign links, variants appear: "Newsletter", "newsletter" and "nl" are three different sources in every report. With several agencies it gets worse, because each one brings its own habits. A naming convention fixes this, but only if it is the same for everyone and easy to follow.

Why a standard beats good intentions

Reports are only as clean as the links they come from. Cleaning up afterwards costs time, and data that was recorded wrongly often cannot be matched up again. So the effort belongs at the start: whoever builds the link should not even be able to pick a wrong spelling.

This matters most when agencies are involved. An agency works for several clients and only knows your rules if you give them to it. Without a shared standard you end up comparing reports that were produced under different rules.

What belongs in the convention

Write down which values are allowed:

• Source: the specific platform, for example linkedin, newsletter, google.
• Medium: the type of channel, for example social, email, cpc, print.
• Campaign: the specific activity, ideally with a time reference, for example autumn-sale-2026.
• Spelling: all lower case, hyphens instead of spaces, no accented letters or special characters.
• Optional fields: what content, placement or ad group are used for and what the values are called.

The rule behind it: the source is always specific, the medium always a category. For the Matomo details, such as the difference between MTM and UTM parameters, see the article Campaign tracking in Matomo on feinwerk.io.

How to introduce the standard

1. Take stock: collect the values that appear in your reports today and settle on one value per channel that stays.
2. Settle who owns it: one person or a small team maintains the list of allowed values. Everyone else works with it.
3. One source of truth: the convention lives in one place everyone knows, not scattered across e-mails and slide decks.
4. One path for new values: whoever needs a new value requests it. One person checks and approves it, and from then on it applies to everyone.
5. Involve agencies from the start: include the convention in every agency brief and ask them to confirm they use it.
6. Review regularly: once a quarter, look through the reports for deviations.

Several agencies, one taxonomy

When several agencies work for you at the same time, a few principles decide whether the standard holds:

• The list is yours. The convention belongs to the company, not to the agency. Agencies work with your list and propose new values instead of introducing their own.
• Who built it does not belong in the name. If the agency appears in source or medium, one channel splits into several rows in the report. Record who is responsible for a campaign, but somewhere else, for example in the campaign plan.
• Shared fields fixed, details free. Source, medium and campaign are the same for everyone. For content or placement each agency may go into more detail, as long as the spelling follows the rules.
• Plan for changes. When an agency leaves, the list and the links stay with you, and the next one works by the same rules. How that works without losing data is in the guide Switch agencies without losing data.

Check whether the standard holds

A convention rarely fails at the design stage. It fails in daily work: it sits in a file nobody opens, it gets diluted with every handover, and nobody sees whether it is followed. So check regularly what actually arrives:

1. Once a month, open the campaign report in Matomo and compare sources, media and campaign names with your list.
2. Sort out every unknown value: fix typos in the link, add genuinely new channels to the list.
3. Ask where a value comes from that keeps turning up. Usually there is a link behind it that was built outside the rules.

An example

Lindenholz Küchen works with its own marketing team and with Nordlicht Media. The team writes newsletter, the agency writes Newsletter, and the report shows two rows. After the convention is introduced, both use newsletter with the medium email. If the agency needs a new channel, say podcast, it requests the value, the team approves it, and from then on everyone can use it.

Feinwerk Campaigns

In Feinwerk Campaigns an Admin sets the convention for the workspace, teams and agencies pick values from the list and can request new ones. How that works is described in the handbook under Set up the naming convention. If you would like to try this with your team and your agencies, get in touch on the pilot page.