UTM Campaign Naming Conventions: Complete Standards Guide

Five different people name the same campaign five different ways:

• summer_sale
• Summer Sale
• summer-sale
• SUMMER_SALE
• summersale

In GA4, those are five separate campaigns. Your $50,000 budget is fragmented, reports are noisy, and simple questions like “How did our Black Friday campaign perform across channels?” become manual spreadsheet work.

This guide gives you a campaign naming standard you can copy, examples for each channel, and a rollout plan so everyone—from in‑house marketers to agencies—uses the same convention.

Why Campaign Naming Conventions Matter

Without a standard:

• Campaign results split across multiple names (no clean rollup).
• Year‑over‑year comparisons become unreliable.
• Agencies and internal teams all use their own formats.
• Dashboards and BI models have to patch over messy inputs.

With a standard:

• All activity for one initiative shares the same utm_campaign.
• You can compare quarter over quarter, year over year, and across channels.
• It’s easy to filter or pivot by initiative, audience, or region.
• New teammates ramp faster because they can decode names at a glance.

The Standard Pattern (Copy/Paste)

Use three components in order:

• type – campaign category (ppc, social, email, brand, promo, retarget, event, partner).
• initiative – what the campaign is about (product-launch, summer-sale, webinar-registration).
• timeframe – when it runs (2025-01, q1-2025, 2025-q4, evergreen).

Recommended pattern:

• Lowercase only.
• Hyphens between words.
• Underscores between components.

Examples:

• ppc_product-launch_2025-01
• social_facebook_retarg-cart_2025-q1
• email_customer-nurture_2025-q2
• brand_awareness_2025

Component Rules

Type (campaign category)

• Use a small, approved list: ppc, display, social, email, brand, promo, retarget, event, partner, affiliate.
• Keep it short and descriptive; don’t invent variations per person.

Initiative (what it’s about)

• Name the product, offer, or theme: crm-launch, summer-sale, webinar-ai-playbook.
• Hyphens between words, no spaces, no special characters.
• Avoid “campaign1” or overly clever abbreviations that no one recognizes in 6 months.

Timeframe (when it runs)

• Choose one format and use it everywhere:
  • Quarter: 2025-q1
  • Month: 2025-01
  • Event: black-friday-2025
  • Evergreen: evergreen or alwayson

Channel-Specific Examples

You can use the same convention across channels while still capturing channel nuance.

Paid search (Google/Bing)

• ppc_brand-keywords_2025-q1
• ppc_competitor-terms_2025-02

Paid social (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit)

• social_meta_retarg-cart_2025-q1
• social_linkedin_lead-gen_2025-01
• social_tiktok_awareness_2025-q2

Email

• email_customer-nurture_2025-q1
• email_new-feature-release_2025-02
• email_reactivation_evergreen

Brand / content

• brand_awareness_2025-q3
• brand_thought-leadership_2025
• promo_black-friday-2025

Formatting Guardrails

• Always lowercase: black-friday-2025, never Black-Friday-2025.
• Hyphens for words, underscores between major parts.
• Only letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores.
• Keep names readable but not verbose—aim for 20–40 characters.

When in doubt, ask: “Will someone understand this name in 12 months without context?”

How to Roll This Out

1) Document the standard

• Create a short, shared page (Notion, Google Doc) with:
  • The pattern: type_initiative_timeframe.
  • Approved type values.
  • Examples per channel.
• Make this the single source of truth; link it from briefs and onboarding docs.

2) Update your UTM builder

• If you use a spreadsheet or tool, add dropdowns for type and timeframe.
• Auto-generate utm_campaign from the selected values so people can’t improvise.

3) Train your team and agencies

• Run a 15–20 minute session explaining:
  • Why naming matters (show messy vs clean GA4 reports).
  • How to use the new pattern.
  • A few examples to practice.
• Require the standard for all new campaigns and in external briefs.

4) Add a pre-launch check

• Every campaign brief or QA sheet should include:
  • Proposed utm_campaign.
  • Confirmation that it follows the pattern.
  • Link to the standard document.

QA and Monitoring

• Spot-check new campaigns weekly in GA4 or your BI tool:
  • Look for unexpected campaign names that don’t match the pattern.
  • Flag and fix them early, before they proliferate.
• Once per quarter, export all campaigns and quickly scan for drift in naming.

FAQ

Can I use the same campaign name across platforms?
Yes—and it’s often best to do so. If Google Ads, Meta, and email all support the same initiative, use the same utm_campaign so you can see cross‑channel performance at a glance.

Do I still need utm_source and utm_medium?
Yes. utm_campaign is the initiative; utm_source and utm_medium identify the platform and channel (for example, facebook / paidsocial, google / cpc, newsletter / email).

Should I include year and quarter?
Generally yes. Including the year (and often the quarter) makes comparisons and audits much easier. If a campaign truly is evergreen, evergreen is fine—but avoid ambiguous names like just summer-sale.

What if I need experiments or variants?
Keep utm_campaign the same and differentiate with utm_content or utm_term (for example, utm_content=variant-a vs variant-b). This preserves clean campaign rollups.

Can different teams have their own patterns?
You can, but it’s usually a mistake. Better to extend a single standard (e.g., add extra detail in utm_content) than to have multiple incompatible patterns.

How do I retrofit old naming?
You can’t rename historical utm_campaign values in GA4, but you can:

• Create grouped dimensions or recoded fields in Looker Studio or your BI tool.
• Start enforcing the standard for all new campaigns so the problem doesn’t get worse.

Related resources

• Paid Traffic Without Campaign Name: Why It Breaks Attribution
• ROI Tracking for Paid Campaigns in GA4