Social media numbers alone don't show what comes next
A network's analytics screen shows how many times a post was displayed and how many times its link was clicked. But what a company or shop really wants to know is what happens after that: which page they viewed on your website, whether they sent the inquiry form, whether they bought from the online shop. Such conversions (actions that count as results) can only be counted on the website side.
Website analytics (such as Google Analytics) can tell roughly where people came from, but for people who arrive from a social app, it often can't tell which post they came from. This is where UTM parameters come in: you attach a tag stating "where they came from" to the link's URL and have the analytics read it. A short explanation of the term is in UTM.
The five UTM fields
UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a URL, like ?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social. These five are commonly used, and analytics can count the people who arrive separately by each name.
| Field | Meaning | Example for social posts |
|---|---|---|
| utm_source | Where they came from | The network name, such as x, instagram, facebook |
| utm_medium | What kind of channel | social (regular organic posts) |
| utm_campaign | Which campaign or initiative | 2026-11-sale, new-menu and so on |
| utm_content | Which one within the same campaign | When you want to separate different images or posts |
| utm_term | Search ad keyword | Normally not used for organic social posts |
Remember source and medium as the minimum, and campaign if you want to see results per initiative. Use content when, for example, you want to test two different images in the same campaign.
Decide how to name things
The most common UTM mistake is inconsistent naming. If one day you write X, another day x, and someone else twitter, analytics counts them as separate channels and you can't get a total. Settle the naming in one table and have everyone follow it is the key rule for using UTM.
Decide four things: write in lowercase, how to write each network's name, the medium values, and how to name campaigns (such as year-month plus content). Keep the table you decide in your operating rules. How to build them is in how to write operating rules and guidelines.
Notes when adding by hand
When adding UTM by hand, check whether the original URL already contains a ?. If it does, connect with & instead of ?. Japanese characters and spaces can cause garbled text, so it's safest to use only letters, numbers and hyphens. After adding, click the link to check that the page opens and that the visit shows up in the realtime view of your analytics.
Combining with short URLs
A URL with UTM tags gets long. On some networks URLs count toward the character limit, and a long URL is hard to read. So a common approach is to replace the long UTM-tagged URL with a short one in your post. People who click go through the short URL to the original URL with the UTM tags.
When using short URLs, pay attention to which service shortened them. A short URL from a service people have never heard of may make people cautious about clicking. Also, if a shortening service shuts down, links in all past posts stop opening. Choose one with a clear operator that will last.
A short URL's click count and your analytics count won't match
The "click count" that a short URL service counts and the "number of visitors" your website analytics counts usually don't match. Some people close the page before it opens after clicking, and some have ad blockers or similar that stop analytics from running. Also, some services count the automatic fetches that networks do to build link previews as clicks. The two numbers count different things, so read each by its own trend of rising and falling.
An example of naming rules
It's easiest to put the naming rules in a table in your operating rules. For an official account of a small business or shop, rules like these are enough.
| Field | What to write | What not to write |
|---|---|---|
| utm_source | x / instagram / facebook / threads / linkedin | X, Twitter, IG, insta |
| utm_medium | social (organic posts), paid-social (social ads) | sns, SNS, social media |
| utm_campaign | year-month-content (example: 2026-11-xmas) | No year, Japanese, containing spaces |
| utm_content | Differences between posts or images (example: photo-a, photo-b) | Made up on the spot each time |
If you want to count ads and organic posts separately, it's important to give the medium different values. If you use social for both, people who came from ads and from posts get mixed, and you can't tell which led to results.
Name campaigns so that time and content are clear when you line them up later. "sale" alone doesn't say when the sale was. Putting the year and month at the front means they sort in time order when listed in analytics. The table you decide can be handed over as is to a new manager or an agency.
How to read the results
In analytics, line up the number of visitors and the number of results by source and medium, and you can see which network is leading to results. Line them up by campaign and you can see which initiative worked. A network with many visitors but few results may have posts that don't match the page's content. Conversely, a network with few visitors but many results can be read as bringing highly engaged customers even with few posts.
Put these numbers in the "what happened beyond the link" section of your monthly report, and you can show how running social media led to sales and inquiries. The report format is in how to write a monthly report.
What you can do with SNS TOWN
With SNS TOWN short links, when your post body contains a URL, a "Make it a short URL" switch appears on the compose screen. Turn it on, and when the post goes out, the URL in the body is replaced with a short URL starting with sns.town/l/, which sends people to the original URL with UTM. utm_source is filled in automatically with the name of the network you're posting to and utm_medium with social, so names don't drift. If the original URL already has UTM, it isn't overwritten. URLs that are already short aren't replaced.
Only clicks by people are counted, by day. Automatic fetches made to build link previews on networks and fetches by search engines are not counted. The clicker's IP address is not kept. The numbers appear on the post's page as "Link clicks," showing the total and the last 7 days.
Alongside your analytics numbers, you can see post reactions in Analytics. Lining up which posts' URLs were clicked most with the posts' reactions helps you see which ways of writing make people want to click.
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เริ่มฟรีFrequently asked questions
Does adding UTM change how my post looks or reaches people?
UTM is text added to the end of a URL for analytics to read, so the page's content doesn't change. But a long URL is hard to read if shown as is, so it's common to combine it with a short URL or to post it in the form the network displays as a link card.
Should I add UTM to my profile link too?
If you do, you can count people who came from your profile separately from people who came from posts. Put a fixed name such as profile in campaign so it doesn't mix with campaigns for individual posts.
No one at our company can read the analytics.
UTM takes little effort to add, so we recommend adding it now. When someone can later read the analytics, you can compare past data too. Even just a short URL's click count tells you which posts' links were clicked.
When I post the same URL many times, should I change the UTM each time?
Change campaign if you want to separate results by initiative, and content if you want to see differences between posts within the same initiative. You don't have to change everything each time. Decide based on what you want to compare.
Don't short URLs look suspicious?
Some people are wary of the look of a short URL. Using a short URL from a service with a known operator and stating in the post where it leads, like "details here," reduces the worry before clicking.
