UTM sources and mediums

When you track a form or a page, you can narrow what gets counted to traffic from one particular channel. Source and medium are how you do that.

• Source is where the traffic came from: Google, LinkedIn, a newsletter, an event.
• Medium is how it got to you: organic search, paid social, email, a QR code.

Both are optional. Leave them as No source set and No medium set and the tracked item counts everything, whatever channel it arrived from.

Setting them narrows the count. A tracked form with the source Google and the medium Paid search counts only responses that arrived tagged that way, and ignores everything else. That is what lets you compare channels: track the same form several times, once per combination, and each card reports on its own channel.

Listed in the order they appear in the dropdown:

• No source set
• Bing
• Conference
• DuckDuckGo
• Email
• Event
• Facebook
• Google
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Newsletter
• Partner
• Pinterest
• Reddit
• Slack
• Snapchat
• Threads
• TikTok
• Webinar
• WhatsApp
• X
• Yahoo
• YouTube
• Custom

Recognised sources show their logo on the tracking card, so you can tell channels apart at a glance.

Listed in the order they appear in the dropdown:

• No medium set
• Affiliate
• Audio
• CPC
• Direct mail
• Display
• Email
• Event
• Influencer
• Organic
• Organic search
• Organic social
• Paid search
• Paid social
• Partnership
• PR
• Print
• Push notification
• QR code
• Referral
• SMS
• Social
• Sponsorship
• Video
• Webinar
• Custom

If the channel you want is not in the list, select Custom. A text field appears, labelled Custom UTM source or Custom UTM medium, and whatever you type there is used for matching.

The field is required once you have chosen Custom. Leaving it empty stops the tracking being added, and you will see Enter a custom UTM source or Enter a custom UTM medium message.

Custom values appear on the tracking card in the same way the built-in ones do.

Contensis matches incoming traffic on the values carried in the link someone followed. Building those links is done in whatever tool you use to run the campaign, your email platform or ad platform for example, rather than in Contensis.

Two things follow from that, and they are the most common reason a tracked item stays on zero:

• The source and medium you select here have to match what your links actually carry. Selecting Google and Paid search counts nothing unless your links are tagged that way.
• If you are unsure how your links are tagged, leave both fields unset. The tracked item will then count every response or visit, which is a more useful starting point than a precise filter that matches nothing.