UTMs for Pour Now
1. Why use UTMs
The pixels and conversion tags in the other guides all answer one question: did a retailer click happen? UTMs answer a different question: where did that click come from? Put the two together, and you can see not just how many retailer clicks your Link drove, but which campaign, channel, and creative drove them.
First, a quick definition. In Pour Now, a Link is how you activate a Listing. You can activate the same Link as a URL, an Embed, or a QR code, and all three report back to the same Link in your Pour Now analytics. UTMs are short labels you enable on a Link in the platform, and they apply to that Link's URL and QR activations. They change nothing about how the Listing works, and the shopper experience is unaffected. The labels travel with the click into GA4 and into any analytics that reads the inbound URL, where they become the source, medium, and campaign behind every retailer click.
Without UTMs, paid, social, and email traffic tends to collapse into "direct" or "referral," and you lose the ability to tell what is working from what is not.
Coming soon: dynamic UTM reporting. Today, these labels feed GA4. Pour Now is adding dynamic UTM reporting, which will break a single Link's performance down by UTM directly in your Pour Now analytics. Setting a clean, consistent convention now means that reporting is useful the day it arrives.
2. What a UTM looks like
When you enable UTMs on a Link, Pour Now appends a few key=value pairs to that Link's URL. There are five standard parameters, and you rarely need all of them:
- utm_source: where the traffic came from, for example
meta,google,klaviyo,instagram - utm_medium: the type of channel, for example
paid_social,email,organic_social,cpc - utm_campaign: the specific campaign, for example
summer_rose_2026 - utm_content: which placement or creative, so you can tell variants apart, for example
carousel_a - utm_term: paid search keywords, usually left off for social and email
Filled in, the Link's URL ends up looking like this:
You do not type this string yourself. The platform builds it from the fields you fill in, which is what section 3 covers. Always set at least the first three: source, medium, and campaign. Anything you leave out shows up as "(not set)" in reporting and muddies the picture.
3. How to add UTMs to a Link
UTMs are built into the platform, so there is nothing to hand-build. You enable UTMs on a Link, enter your campaign information, and Pour Now applies them to that Link's URL and QR activations.
- Navigate to Listings.
- Find the Listing you want, click the three dots on the right of its card, and choose Links.
- Find the Link you want to tag, click the three dots on the right of its card, and choose Edit.
- Toggle UTMs on, choose Google Analytics or Custom, enter your campaign information, and save.
Two modes, one easy call. Google Analytics gives you the standard fields, source, medium, campaign, content, and term, that GA4 reads automatically, and it is the right choice for almost everyone. Use Custom only when another system you report into expects a parameter that is not one of the standard five.
Then verify. Open the Link's URL, go to GA4's Realtime or DebugView, and confirm the session shows the source, medium, and campaign you entered, and that the retailer click attributes to it. For how that click reaches GA4, see the GA4 setup in the Meta guide.
A note on Google Ads. If you run Google Ads with auto-tagging enabled, which is the default (see the Google Ads guide), you do not need UTM parameters on those Links. Google's gclid already carries the campaign data into reporting, and stacking manual UTMs on top can conflict with it. Use UTMs for Meta, TikTok, email, and organic posts, and let Google Ads tag itself.
4. Best practices that drive success
Default to Google Analytics mode. The standard UTM fields are what GA4 reads automatically and what dynamic UTM reporting will key on. Reach for Custom only when a specific tool needs a non-standard parameter.
Lock a naming convention and write it down. Use lowercase only, pick underscores or hyphens and use just one, and keep a shared sheet of the values you use. GA4 is case-sensitive, so meta and Meta become two different sources and split your reporting in two.
Use standard mediums. GA4 sorts traffic into channels based on the medium value, so use the ones it recognizes, like cpc or paid_social, email, and organic_social, rather than inventing your own. Non-standard values land your traffic in "Unassigned."
Keep the campaign stable, vary the content. Across the placements in one campaign, hold utm_campaign constant and change utm_content. That lets a campaign roll up cleanly while you still compare the pieces underneath it.
Let the platform tag every activation. Setting UTMs on the Link means its URL and QR activations carry the same correct labels. Avoid hand-editing a URL on the side, which leaves one activation tagged and another not.
Never put personal data in a UTM. The values are visible in the URL and stored in analytics, so no names, emails, or phone numbers, ever.
5. Important: where UTMs can and cannot see
UTMs describe the inbound visit, not the outcome. They tell you which campaign drove a retailer click, but like the pixel, they stop at the retailer's door. They cannot see whether the purchase happened on the retailer's site.
They also ride on a Link's URL and QR activations. Even with UTMs enabled on the Link, the Embed activation has no inbound Pour Now URL for the shopper to navigate to, so it cannot carry them the same way. For a Link activated as an Embed, campaign attribution comes from your own site's analytics on the page that hosts it.
And attribution is session-scoped. The UTM labels the session the shopper arrives in, and the retailer click in that session inherits it. If someone arrives untagged or comes back later directly, the attribution can shift under GA4's last-non-direct rules. UTMs make your good traffic legible. They are not a perfect ledger.
Read alongside Pour Now's own analytics, which show Purchase Intent, Purchase Action, and estimated GMV by retailer, UTMs let you trace a campaign from "which ad" all the way to "how many retailer clicks," and, as dynamic UTM reporting rolls out, increasingly inside Pour Now itself.
6. Troubleshooting
Traffic shows as direct or referral. UTMs probably are not toggled on for that Link, or a redirect between the ad and the Link is stripping them. Open the Link in Edit, confirm UTMs are enabled and the campaign fields are filled, and check that the activation you shared carries them.
Reporting is split across near-duplicates. Things like facebook versus Facebook, or paid_social versus social_paid. That is case or naming drift. Standardize against your shared sheet.
Traffic lands in "Unassigned." The medium is a value GA4 does not recognize. Switch to a standard one.
Google Ads traffic looks doubled or strange. UTMs are fighting auto-tagging. Turn off UTM parameters on your Google Ads Links and keep auto-tagging enabled.
Retailer clicks are not tied to a campaign. The retailer click must land in the same GA4 session as the tagged entry, and that entry must be a URL or QR activation, not the Embed. Confirm that GA4 is receiving the click and that a tagged activation was the entry point.
For help on the Pour Now side, contact help@pour.now.