UTM naming that survives a year of campaigns
A boring naming convention beats a clever one.
Every analytics account I inherit has the same problem: campaign names that made sense to one person at one moment. After a year, nobody can tell which traffic came from where.
The convention I settled on is deliberately boring: lowercase only, hyphens instead of spaces, and a fixed order of parts in utm_campaign — channel, product, audience, date. No abbreviations that only one person understands.
The real trick is not the format but the place where links are built. A shared spreadsheet with a formula that assembles the URL removes most mistakes, because nobody types parameters by hand anymore.
It takes an afternoon to set up and saves days of guessing later.
Next note: Reading search query reports without losing a day