UTM insights, from people who track for a living
Best practices, announcements, and stories.
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- guide
TikTok dynamic UTM parameters: the macro guide (and the __AID__/__CID__ trap)
TikTok's dynamic UTM macros are easy to misread — __AID__ is the ad group, __CID__ is the creative. Here's the copy-ready template, the syntax rule, and the ttclid story.
- guide
Facebook & Meta dynamic UTM parameters (and why your builder keeps breaking them)
Meta's dynamic UTM tokens use double curly braces and break the moment you rename a campaign. Here's the copy-ready template, the fb-vs-ig split, and a builder that won't mangle the syntax.
- guide
Why your AI traffic shows up as Direct / None — and how to fix it
Some ChatGPT and Perplexity clicks land in your analytics as Direct or None. Here's why the referrer disappears, why no UTM can recover it, and what actually helps.
- guide
Agentic traffic: what AI shopping agents do to your attribution
AI agents that browse and buy on a user's behalf break last-click and pixel-based attribution — here's what survives and how to keep a durable signal.
- guide
GA4 now has a native AI Assistants channel — here's how it works
GA4 detects AI assistants by referrer and files them automatically. Here's the exact rule, what it catches, what it misses, and why you should never set utm_medium=ai-assistant yourself.
- guide
llms.txt and UTMs: why you shouldn't tag the links AI assistants read
llms.txt is a list of your canonical URLs. Putting UTMs on them looks clever and quietly corrupts your analytics. Here's what the file is for and why it should stay clean.
- guide
How to track ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini traffic
AI assistants send real visitors to your site — and your analytics already classifies them from the referrer. Here's where to find that traffic, what's genuinely missing, and why tagging it yourself makes things worse.
- guide
Tracking AI-generated ad campaigns without breaking your UTMs
When you spin up hundreds of AI-written ad variants, structured utm_content and utm_term plus platform macros for utm_id keep every creative comparable.
- guide
There is no UTM convention for AI search — and that's the right answer
Every GEO/AEO guide hands you a utm_source=chatgpt taxonomy. Here's why that convention is wrong, what your analytics already reports instead, and where UTMs genuinely belong in the AI era.
- guide
Use AI to generate and govern your UTM taxonomy
Prompt patterns for getting an LLM to design a UTM naming convention, validate links at scale, and catch casing drift — plus where AI should never be in charge.
- announcement
Two things are breaking the GA4 ↔ Google Ads link in 2026
One already broke for some advertisers in April. One lands June 15 when consent controls split. Here's what changed, what to check, and what to do.
- story
How we rebuilt our UTM conventions after a messy Q3
What we were doing wrong, what broke, and the two-hour meeting that fixed it.
- announcement
GA4 is quietly making utm_id the most important UTM
Campaign ID is how GA4 joins your ad-platform data to your site behavior. If you're leaving utm_id blank, you're leaving Google Ads ↔ GA4 reconciliation on the table.
- guide
UTM parameters best practices (that won't break your reports)
The naming conventions, structure, and small rules that keep UTM-tagged links readable, reportable, and actually useful six months later.