You've spent money on marketing. Maybe it's Facebook ads. Maybe it's a newsletter sponsorship. Maybe you've sent a big email blast.
Now the question: did it actually work? And if multiple things ran at once — which one was responsible?
Most businesses genuinely cannot answer this. Not because the data doesn't exist, but because they never set up the tracking before the campaign went live. Here's how to make sure that never happens to you.
What "tracking a campaign" actually means
When someone clicks a link and lands on your website, your analytics tool (usually Google Analytics) records a visit. But it also tries to record where that visitor came from.
The problem: browsers and apps don't always pass this information reliably. Private messaging apps like WhatsApp and iMessage actively strip it. Apple Mail on iPhone does the same. If you just paste a raw URL into your campaign, a large portion of the resulting traffic will show up as "Direct" — meaning unknown source — even if you know exactly where you sent it.
Campaign tracking fixes this by embedding the source information directly inside the URL. You're not relying on the browser to tell analytics where the visitor came from — you're telling analytics yourself, via the link.
Step 1 — Add UTM tags to your link before it goes out
UTM parameters are small text labels you add to the end of your destination URL. They look like this:
https://yourdomain.com/sale?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=summer_promo
Everything after the ? is tracking information for your analytics tool. The actual page (/sale) is unaffected — visitors land on exactly the same page, they just don't see the tracking code if you shorten the link first.
You need three UTM fields every time:
utm_source— which platform (facebook,google,newsletter,instagram)utm_medium— what type of marketing (cpc,email,organic_social,sms)utm_campaign— what the campaign was (summer_promo_2024,product_launch)
The most important rule: always use lowercase, and use underscores instead of spaces. Facebook and facebook show as two different sources in Google Analytics. summer promo breaks the URL. Every typo or inconsistency creates a new row in your report that you'll have to untangle later.
Rather than building these by hand, use our Free UTM Builder — it assembles the tagged URL correctly and prevents formatting mistakes.
Step 2 — Shorten the link before sharing
A URL with UTM tags is usually 150+ characters of tracking code. It looks terrible in a social post, takes up SMS character count, and in some email clients the & symbols can break the link entirely.
Take your tagged URL and shorten it. The short version looks clean (yourbrand.co/summer24) but when someone clicks it, the shortener redirects them to the full tagged URL — so all your analytics fires correctly.
The bonus: the shortener itself also tracks every click independently, at the server level. This is important because Google Analytics can miss traffic when people use ad blockers or privacy browsers. The shortener's click count is a second data source that captures every click regardless of what the browser blocks.
Create your links in gometrify and you get both in one step — the branded short link and an independent server-side click log that doesn't depend on JavaScript or cookies. Try it free →
Step 3 — Review the numbers and attribute conversions
Let the campaign run for at least two full days before drawing conclusions. Then look at three numbers:
1. Clicks in your gometrify dashboard This is how many people clicked your link. It's clean, server-side data — completely independent of what any ad platform reports.
2. Sessions in Google Analytics, filtered by your UTM campaign In GA4: Reports → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition. Filter by campaign name. This shows how many of those clicks resulted in an actual session on your site, and what those visitors did.
3. Conversions & Revenue tracked by your script Instead of manually matching orders to campaign sessions, install gometrify's Conversion & Revenue Tracking Script on your thank-you page. It automatically reads the unique click ID and fires the exact conversion value back to your dashboard in real time.
Now compare all three:
- Big gap between clicks and sessions? Your landing page might be slow, broken on mobile, or the offer didn't match the ad.
- Good sessions but low conversions? The audience was right but the offer or page copy is the problem.
- Big gap between your click count and the platform's reported conversions? The platform is probably over-attributing — your script data is the more honest number.
Read our complete Conversion & Revenue Tracking Script Setup Guide to start measuring actual ROI on every link.