- Inconsistent or Missing UTMs
Even a small variation — like email vs. Email vs. e-mail — creates separate rows in GA4.
Missing UTMs are even worse: clicks lose their context entirely, making it impossible to tie traffic back to a specific campaign. - Different Team Members Use Different Naming Styles
If agencies, partners, or internal team members create campaign links without a shared system, your UTMs become a patchwork of formats.
That makes it hard to group results, compare performance, or understand what actually worked. - Untagged Campaign Clicks Get Misclassified as Direct or Referral
This is one of the most overlooked issues.
When a link has no UTMs:
GA4 doesn’t know where the visitor came from. So it labels the session as direct
Or, if the click passed through another site or app, it may get labeled as a referral
Neither classification reflects the true source. This hides real campaign performance and inflates channels that shouldn’t be getting credit. - Duplicate or Conflicting Parameter Values
Small inconsistencies—like blackfriday, black_friday, BlackFriday2025—fragment the data.
Instead of one unified campaign performance line, you get multiple scattered entries that dilute insights. - Manual UTM Creation Leaves Room for Errors
When UTMs are created quickly or by hand, it’s easy to miss a parameter, mistype a name, or mix formatting.
Those small errors add up, and over time, they create noisy, unreliable reporting.
A consistent UTM structure is one of the simplest, most effective ways to improve data quality at the source.
If you’d like a tool that keeps everyone aligned and helps reduce these issues, feel free to try UTM Manager — it was built to make UTM consistency much easier.