When should you use UTM tags follow the SchemaFirst UTM Standard?

Run this when more than one person, team or tool tags your campaigns. The SchemaFirst UTM Standard exists so that the same campaign tagged twice comes out with the same values, and an email is where that promise is usually broken: one link says `Spring-Sale`, the next says `spring_sale_email`, and analytics reports three campaigns where there was one. It includes every tracking integrity rule, so it replaces that check in a run rather than sitting beside it.

Skip it on mail that carries no tracking by design, such as plain transactional notices and internal messages. Skip it if your organisation follows a different naming convention on purpose; the tracking integrity check grades hygiene without imposing a convention. Do not run both in the same job: everything tracking integrity reports, this check reports too.

a tagged link missing its source, medium or campaign; a source alias such as fb or e-mail sent instead of the canonical name; a medium that does not fit its source; a campaign name that is not a lowercase underscore slug; a campaign name that repeats the channel or source; UTM values in mixed case or with spaces

A failure is either a tracking integrity finding (a merge token, a click ID, personal data, a dropped parameter), which means a click is lost or exposed, or a standard finding, which means the click arrives but is filed under a name nobody else would have chosen. An alias such as `fb` reports as a different source from `facebook`, and a medium that does not fit its source files the click under the wrong channel. A campaign that is not a slug, or that repeats its own channel, splits one campaign into several report rows. A missing source, medium or campaign means the click cannot be attributed in full. A missing `utm_id` or `utm_source_platform` is a recommendation and never fails the send.

The standard's rules are fixed. Its version, 0.1.0, is recorded on every result, so a verdict can be traced to the text it was graded against. The ten parameters are the nine tracking integrity parameters, with the same defaults, plus an approved campaign list that is empty by default. Source names are judged against the SchemaFirst source registry, which holds email, SMS and seven search, social and video platforms: an alias such as `fb` or `e-mail` fails, and so does a medium the registry does not give that source. A source the registry does not hold, such as your own newsletter name, is not guessed at.

SchemaFirst.org publishes community-governed standards for digital QA. ArbiterQA is a supporter and commercial licensee of those standards; citation does not mean SchemaFirst operates ArbiterQA.