How campaign tagging works
Three small words decide what your reports can tell you
- 01
The link carries the answer, analytics does not guess it
Nothing on your website can work out on its own that a visit came from the second story you posted rather than the first, or from the flyer rather than the email. The only thing that separates them is what you wrote into the link before you shared it.
- 02
Source and medium make a visit attributable at all
Source is where it came from, medium is how it travelled, and without both the visit usually lands in an unattributed bucket. Campaign is the name that groups every link belonging to the same push, so the push can be read as one thing.
- 03
Spelling is most of the job
GA4 compares these values as text, so Google and google are two sources and "spring offer" and spring-offer are two campaigns. That is how one campaign quietly becomes three rows that each look too small to matter. Forcing lower case and one space rule is the whole fix.
- 04
Term and content separate things that would otherwise merge
Two links in the same email, or the button and the image in the same post, arrive identical unless content tells them apart. Term exists for the paid keyword, and is worth leaving empty when a platform already reports that itself.
- 05
A QR code is the same link, printed
The code below encodes the tagged address itself rather than pointing at a redirect service, so a scan from a flyer or a shop window is attributed exactly like a click — and it keeps working whether or not this site does.
What a tagged link cannot do
Tagging labels a visit; it does not measure one. Analytics still has to be installed and working on the destination, which is what the GA4 / GTM Tracking Checker is for. Parameters are also lost whenever something strips them: a redirect that drops the query string, a shortener that rebuilds the address, an app that rewrites outgoing links, or a reader who copies the page address from their bar after landing. And a tagged link cannot repair attribution that is already broken by a cross-domain or self-referral problem, because it is only ever describing the first visit it was part of.
Tagging changes what your analytics records, not what the page does. Open any link once before you publish or print it. By using this tool, you agree to the Terms of Use.