UTM parameters and presets

Tag your links so your own analytics tool can tell your channels apart, and save the combinations you use often.

Reviewed 24 Oct 2026

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What UTM parameters are for

ShortZen tells you how many people clicked your link. UTM parameters tell the analytics tool on your own website where those people came from. They are how your site knows a visitor arrived from the June newsletter rather than a paid ad.

Set them on the link and ShortZen appends them to the destination on every click. You hand out a clean short address; the tagged URL only appears in the visitor's address bar at the end.

You share:      your-domain/june-news
They land on:   https://example.com/pricing?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=june

The five fields

Field	Answers	Example
Campaign	Which effort is this part of?	june-launch
Source	Which specific place did it come from?	newsletter, twitter, partner-blog
Medium	What kind of channel is that?	email, cpc, social, print
Content	Which version, when two links point to the same page?	hero-cta, footer-link
Term	Which paid keyword?	url shortener

Consistency matters more than completeness

Analytics tools treat Email, email, and e-mail as three different channels, which quietly splits one campaign into three. Agree on lowercase, hyphenated values and stick to them. Campaign, source, and medium are enough for most work: content and term are for when you genuinely need them.

Presets

A preset is a saved set of these five values under a name you choose. Instead of retyping the same newsletter tags on every link, you pick the preset and the fields fill themselves.

Fill in the UTM fields on any link the way you want them.
Press Save as preset, give it a name, and save.
On the next link, choose it from Apply preset and the fields populate.

UTM presets, by plan: Free 3 · Starter 10 · Pro 50 · Business 200

Presets are a starting point

Applying one fills the fields; you are free to change any of them afterwards. Editing a link's UTM values does not change the preset.

UTMs and ShortZen's own analytics

Your UTM values also feed the Campaigns panel on the Analytics page, so you can compare campaigns inside ShortZen without leaving for another tool. It has two modes. Tagged on the link has something to show only for links that carry UTM tags. On the click, on Pro and above, reads the tags off the short URL each visitor actually clicked.

Tagged on the link means the tags saved on it

Tagged on the link groups clicks by the UTM values saved on each link. It does not read utm_source, utm_medium, or utm_campaign off the short URL the visitor clicked. On the click does that. Edit a link's tags and future clicks roll up under the new values; already-recorded days stay as they were.

Step by step

Set up a preset your whole team can reuse

For: Whoever owns campaign naming, usually marketing

Before you start

An agreed naming convention for source and medium values.
At least one preset slot left on your plan.

Steps

Start creating a link. You do not have to finish it.
Open the UTM parameters section.
Fill in the values that will be the same on every link for this channel.
Usually Source and Medium. Leave Campaign blank if it changes per campaign: the preset is for the constant part.
Press Save as preset.
A name field appears.
Name it after the channel, not the campaign.
"Newsletter" ages well. "June newsletter" is stale in July.
The preset appears in the Apply preset list for everyone in the workspace.
On your next link, apply the preset and add only the campaign-specific value.
The shared fields fill themselves; you type one thing instead of five.

What you should see

A named preset in the workspace that anyone can apply, so every link from that channel is tagged the same way without anyone having to remember the convention.

How to check it worked

The preset appears in the Apply preset dropdown for other members of the workspace.
Applying it fills the UTM fields with the values you saved.
A test click lands on a destination whose address carries the expected utm_ parameters.

Edge cases

You are at your plan's preset limit.: Delete a preset you no longer use, or upgrade. Presets are cheap to recreate: deleting an unused one costs nothing.
Your destination URL already has a query string.: The UTM parameters are appended to it correctly. You do not need to do anything special.

If something goes wrong

Your website analytics shows the traffic as direct or unattributed.: Click the short link yourself and read the address bar you land on. If the utm_ parameters are not there, they are not set on the link. If they are there, the problem is on the receiving side: check your site is not stripping the query string on redirect.
One campaign is showing up split across several rows.: In almost every case, capitalisation or a spelling variant. Standardise the values on the affected links and use a preset from then on.

Try it on a real link

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