Field notes
UTM hygiene before you commission a board
Four naming habits that keep multi-channel attribution dashboards readable after the handover glow fades.
A multi-channel attribution dashboard inherits every shortcut your media team took with campaign names. Fixing taxonomy after go-live is possible; preventing the mess is cheaper.
One market token
Agree a fixed token for nation or city (for example gb or sco) and place it in the same position in every campaign name. Boards that slice by geography fail quietly when tokens wander.
Separate offer from channel
Do not encode “sale” and “meta” in the same free-text field without a delimiter rule. Your future self will thank you when filtering paid social winter offers.
Ban vanity renames mid-flight
Renaming a live campaign mid-month splits its history. If leadership wants a prettier label, add an alias in the glossary instead of rewriting the source name.
Review monthly
Stewardship calls exist for a reason. Fifteen minutes on naming drift prevents a Monday board that looks like two brands merged overnight.