UTM parameters

Worked example

You post your launch in a Reddit community and in a newsletter. Instead of your plain address, you share:

• https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch
• https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=newsletter-name&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=launch

Every visit from each link now carries where it came from, and so does every signup that follows, even if the browser doesn’t send a referring site.

The three that matter

• utm_source: where the link was posted (reddit, x, producthunt, a newsletter’s name).
• utm_medium: the kind of channel (social, email, paid, referral).
• utm_campaign: which effort (launch, sep-promo, ad-3). This is the one that tells two posts in the same place apart.

utm_term and utm_content exist too; early on, three are enough.

Why they matter when you’re starting out

Many visits arrive with no referring site at all: from apps, from email, from links copied into chats. Without tags they all look like “direct”, and you can’t tell which post worked. Tags also can’t be added afterwards: a visit that came in untagged stays unknown.

Naming rules that save you later

• Lowercase, hyphens, no spaces: launch-week, never Launch Week.
• The same name for the same thing every time. reddit and Reddit count as two sources.
• Keep a short list of the names you use.

Mistakes to avoid

• Tagging links between your own pages. A tag on an internal link overwrites where the visitor really came from.
• Different names for the same place. twitter, x and x.com split one channel into three.

In Nordva Launch

Launch records utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign with every visit (with its analytics script) and with every waitlist signup (with or without the script), and the Insights page groups visits, signups and paying customers by them. Grouping paying customers by UTM values needs the Builder plan; referring sites work on every plan.