Creating Custom Links with UTMs (and Why Tracking Matters Early)

Suze Dowling
Creating Custom Links with UTMs (and Why Tracking Matters Early)

Most founders are flying blind when it comes to marketing attribution. You’re spending across channels—Facebook, TikTok, email, SMS—but when you check your analytics, the numbers don’t add up.

The missing piece? UTMs.

What UTMs Are (and Why You Should Care)

UTMs are little tags you add to links so your analytics tool can actually tell you where a click came from. Instead of a vague “Direct” or “Other,” you’ll know whether someone came from:

  • A paid Instagram ad

  • A Klaviyo email

  • A TikTok Spark ad

  • A partner’s affiliate link

For founders, this matters because it turns fuzzy “marketing spend” into hard data you can act on.

The Three UTM Tags That Matter Most

Forget the full laundry list. If you’re just getting started, focus on:

1. Source – where the traffic came from (facebook, instagram, klaviyo).

2. Medium – what type of channel (paidsocial, email, affiliate).

3. Campaign – the initiative you’re running (holiday_sale, product_launch).

That’s enough to turn a black box into a clear report.

The Trap Founders Fall Into

Most DTC founders don’t fail at marketing—they fail at measurement. Without UTMs:

  • You can’t compare ROI across channels.

  • You don’t know which ads deserve more spend.

  • You miss opportunities hiding in plain sight.

I’ve seen brands scale 2–3x faster once they set this up—not because they spent more, but because they knew what to cut and what to double down on.

Quick Start: One Thing You Can Do This Week

Pick your highest spend channel (usually Meta Ads). Add UTMs to your campaigns with just three fields: source, medium, campaign.

It takes 10 minutes, and in 30 days you’ll have cleaner data than most brands at your stage.

Where to Go From Here

This is just the tip of the iceberg. In my full playbook, I break down:

  • How to set up naming conventions that scale with your team

  • The mistakes that cause “dirty data” and how to prevent them

  • How to use UTMs inside ad platforms like Meta and Google without manual tagging

  • The dashboards that make insights jump off the page

For the full playbook, see Paid Media, Built to Scale inside The DTC Operator.