Tarvent · internal
Build a tagged link so it reports in the weekly analytics digest. post_key carries which content; utm_source and utm_medium carry which platform. An untagged link cannot be attributed after the fact.
Values are forced to lowercase as you type. GA4 stores them exactly as sent, so LinkedIn and linkedin would otherwise become two rows splitting the same credit.
GA4's default channel grouping matches these exact lowercase strings. The channel column is what appears in the digest's traffic report.
| utm_medium | GA4 channel | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
social | Organic Social | Unpaid LinkedIn, Reddit, X and Facebook posts and comments |
dm | Unassigned | One-to-one chats and DMs. No channel by design — the point is separating conversations from broadcast posts. |
paid-social | Paid Social | Promoted posts and social ad units |
email | Newsletters and campaigns, including ones sent from Tarvent | |
cpc | Paid Search | Google and Bing ads |
referral | Referral | Directory listings, review sites, podcast show notes |
affiliate | Affiliates | Partner and reseller links |
display | Display | Banner and retargeting placements |
qr | Unassigned | Print and events |
GA4 does not normalise case, so Reddit and reddit become two rows that split one effort's credit. Mixed-case history cannot be cleaned up afterwards.
A space becomes %20 and reads as a different value from the one intended. Underscores work but fragment against hyphenated siblings, so this tool picks hyphens.
A UTM on a link between Tarvent pages starts a fresh session and overwrites the real source, so someone who arrived from Reddit is recorded as arriving from your own nav. Tag only links that live somewhere else.
The agency guide keeps agency-guide-2026 whether the link sits in a LinkedIn post, a DM or a conference slide. Source and medium already say where it ran, so reusing the key is what lets the digest add those placements back up.
A link pasted into a chat arrives with no referrer and lands in direct traffic, indistinguishable from someone typing the URL. Tagging is the only way one-to-one outreach ever shows up as itself.