How to use campaign tagging in GA4

If you're not already familiar with using UTM parameters you're missing a great opportunity to understand how your marketing efforts are driving value for your organisation.

UTM parameters are query parameters that you add to the end of links on your outbound marketing activities. These custom URLs still go to the same destination, but Google uses the parameters to identify where the user clicked them, and in turn what sources and campaigns sent them to your website.

If you are familiar with campaign tagging, it has essentially the same principles in GA4 as it had in Universal Analytics, but there are a few key considerations to note.

New campaign parameters in GA4

In Universal Analytics we had the following options:

• utm_source: the referrer e.g. Facebook, google

• utm_medium: the type of referrer e.g. paid_social, organic_social

• utm_campaign: the campaign name e.g. christmas_sale

• utm_term: typically used for the keyword for search campaigns

• utm_content: typically used to describe the content e.g. for display campaigns

In GA4 there are three new parameters you can use to provide even more context about your marketing sources:

• utm_source_platform: the platform that sent the traffic (such as the buying platform) e.g. search ads 360

• utm_creative_format: the type of creative e.g. display, video, search

• utm_marketing_tactic: the targeting criteria applied e.g. remarketing, prospecting

Note: creative format and marketing tactic are not available in reports yet, but will no doubt be coming soon.

No customisation of channels in GA4

Another key difference in GA4 (as it stands) is that there's no way to customise the definitions for your channels.

Going back to your acquisition reports, you'll see that all traffic is grouped by channel, but there's no UTM parameter called channel. The way this works is that GA has a set of rules that groups up the traffic based on the source, medium, and other stuff.

In UA you were able to customise the channel grouping rules but this isn't possible in GA4 yet, which means that you'll have to tag your marketing URLs in a way that fits Google's rules. If you don't you'll end up seeing lots of traffic coming through as 'Unassigned' in your acquisition reports.

Let's look at an example. Say you're running some paid Facebook activity. In UA you could tag this with the medium social_paid and create a new channel grouping rule to capture that in your acquisition reports. In GA4 this naming convention would lead to this falling into the 'Unassigned' bucket. For GA4 you'll need to refer to the channel definitions and ensure you're tagging links according to them.

Given the changes in GA4, now is the perfect time to review your campaign naming conventions and processes. A good process is key to ensuring your marketing data is clean and useful, which can be hard, especially where multiple people are involved, but is worth it!

Tagging your marketing links is also increasingly important given recent browser developments, many of which strip all but the domain name from the referrer. The referrer is what appears as the source in Google Analytics if no utm_source parameter has been added, so it's best to tag any links you have access to.

Campaign tagging resources

URL builder

You can use Google's URL builder to create your campaign URLs from scratch. Just type in the URL you want to send traffic to, and add your values to each of the campaign tagging parameters.

Campaign tagging template

The URL builder is useful, but creating individual URLs in isolation can lead to inconsistent tagging, which results in data that is disorganised and not easy to work with.

Using this campaign tagging template I created will help maintain consistency and clean data in two ways.

Download the template

When you create a new tagged link in the template you can see previously created links and reuse existing campaign names or values for other parameters. This breeds consistency, preventing data for the same campaigns (or types of campaigns) from being fragmented across different rows in your data.

Inconsistent campaign tagging example. Notice how annoying it would be to work with data from the same campaign split across multiple rows like this.

The second benefit of the template is that the utm_medium column is locked down. It only allows users to select values for the medium that corresponds with values that are recognised by GA4's channel grouping rules. This ensures your tagged traffic won't get categorised as 'Unassigned' in your channel reports, like this:

Tagging links with parameters that don't fit any of GA4 channel grouping rule leads to 'Unassigned' appearing in the channel reports

Other resources

Really Good Data created this GA4 URL builder. It's similar to Google's official one with one really useful addition: you can select the channel you want your link to appear under and it will tell you the rules you need to stick to in order for it to do so.

If you're looking for an enterprise solution, UTM.io's platform can help you manage your link tagging across large teams. It also has additional features like a link shortener and a Chrome extension.

Now that you've learned how to ensure you collect clean and consistent marketing data, why not learn more about how to access and utilise that data? Check out my article How to Analyse Marketing Performance in GA4.