: Are there any drawbacks to including UTM information on outbound links? The question: Pros and cons of tracking referral trafic with "utm" tags asks for pros and cons but is quite

@Jennifer507

You should not include UTM codes for outbound links. Stephen already pointed out the main issue in that you don't know how they tag their campaigns and therefore without working directly with them it's impossible to provide them good tags (even if you can guess how they're doing it now they may change it).

Also you don't have to include UTM codes for them to know the referral is coming from you. That will already be in the Source information in Google Analytics for any clicks that came from your site. Stephen mentioned this but the traffic wouldn't show up as Organic traffic. Instead it would just be normal Referral traffic and could be found under the All Referrals section under Acquisition.

If you'd like to know on your side how many people are actually clicking on these links you could use GA Event Tracking to track the click events on these links. For information on how to do this check out this Google Support answer. support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en
So basically don't do this. You should only include UTM codes for links to a website if that website has both asked you to do so and told you what codes they want you to use.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Heady270

I can think of several reasons why I might be unhappy to have the links to my website from yours include utm parameters that you have chosen for me:


You don't know how I set up my other campaigns. Your choices for campaign name and source are unlikely to match what I use in other places. It will add noise to my Google Analytics campaign report
I would expect that organic referrals would appear in the referrals section of Google Analytics. When you add campaign tracking, they appear under campaigns instead. I wouldn't expect any non-paid traffic to appear there.
Googlebot may not be able to assign link juice from your site to mine properly because the links are not in their canonical form.

Vote Up Vote Down