Why You Should Avoid UTM Tagging on Internal Website Links

Consistent UTM tagging is essential for campaign tracking across external channels, but adding UTM parameters to internal website links (links that move a user from one page on your domain to another) can actually disrupt accurate attribution. Here are the primary reasons professionals avoid this practice:

• It Overrides True First-Touch Attribution:
  When a user arrives on your site from an external source (e.g., a paid ad with relevant UTM tags), their source and campaign are recorded as their "first-touch" in analytics platforms. However, if the user then clicks an internal link on your website that also uses UTM parameters, most analytics systems—like Google Analytics—will overwrite the original source and campaign information with the new UTM values. This results in your reports attributing credit to the internal link instead of the original campaign or referrer, making it impossible to accurately track what actually drove the user's initial visit and conversion.
• It Breaks the Visit and Creates Session Fragmentation:
  UTM parameters are designed for traffic attribution from external sources. When applied to internal links, they often cause analytics tools to start a new session when the user clicks the link. This can inflate session counts and fragment user journeys, leading to misleading performance metrics and a poor understanding of true user behavior.

Examples

1. Overwriting the Original Campaign Source

Suppose a user clicks your Google Ad (with proper UTM tags) and lands on your homepage. If your navigation button to the "Contact Us" page also includes internal UTM tags (e.g., ?utm_source=website&utm_medium=nav&utm_campaign=contact), clicking it will overwrite the original campaign source in analytics. The contact form submission will be (incorrectly) attributed to "website/nav/contact" instead of the paid campaign, preventing you from learning which campaign actually drove the lead.

2. Breaking Session Continuity

Imagine an email campaign drives traffic to your landing page (with email UTM tags). On your landing page, you add internal links to a product details page, each with their own UTM tags. When users click these links, new sessions start, and analytics may now count a single user's journey as multiple sessions from multiple sources, making it hard to understand the actual conversion path and inflating your analytics reports.