Many in-house and agency search marketers use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tags to sort and filter their Google Analytics results for their website traffic. UTM tags are added to the end of a link and are usually formatted like this:http://www.example.com?utm_source=Value&utm_medium=Value&utm_campaign=Value
The UTM source can be something like ‘socialmedia’ or ‘ppc’ and the medium could be ‘twitter’ or ‘adwords’.
However, here’s where UTM tags pose a risk in modifying analytics data- for the majority of internet users, the ‘stuff’ that comes after a question mark in a link is meaningless. They assume that it is just part of the link, not that it is necessarily tracking where they got it from (this is especially true if acronyms are used instead of words like ‘twitter’).
