How to Track Black Friday Campaigns With UTM Links

Black Friday traffic arrives from everywhere at once: newsletters, Instagram, ads, in-store flyers, WhatsApp. Without tracking, Google Analytics lumps much of it into "direct" or "referral" and you can't tell what worked. UTM parameters fix that in five minutes.

Hands analysing marketing data on a laptop

What UTM parameters are

Tags added to the end of a link that tell analytics where the visit came from:

utm_source — the place: newsletter, instagram, google, flyer
utm_medium — the channel type: email, social, cpc, qr
utm_campaign — the campaign: black_friday_2026
utm_content (optional) — which link or version: hero_button, story_1

GA4 reads them automatically — nothing to install.

Plan your names before you send anything

Decide once and write it down, because analytics treats Instagram and instagram as two sources:

Always lowercase.
Underscores instead of spaces.
One campaign name for the whole promotion, e.g. black_friday_2026, and a separate one for cyber_monday_2026.

Ready-made examples

Where the link goes	source	medium	content
Launch newsletter	newsletter	email	launch
Last-chance email	newsletter	email	last_chance
Instagram bio	instagram	social	bio
Instagram story	instagram	social	story_1
Facebook ad	facebook	cpc	carousel_a
In-store poster	poster	qr	window

All with utm_campaign=black_friday_2026.

How to build the links

Open the free UTM Builder.
Paste your sale page URL, e.g. https://yourshop.com/black-friday.
Fill in source, medium and campaign (and content if you need it).
Copy the URL. The builder warns you about capital letters, spaces or a missing medium.

Long links are fine in emails; for social posts and print, shorten them with the URL Shortener — the UTM tags are kept.

Analytics dashboard on a laptop

Tracking offline promotions

Posters, flyers, receipts and packaging can be tracked too: put the UTM link in a QR code with the QR Code Generator and use utm_medium=qr. Every scan shows up in GA4 as its own source. More ideas in QR Codes for Black Friday and Holiday Promotions.

Reading the results in GA4

Go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition, change the dimension to Session campaign, and filter for black_friday_2026. Add Session source / medium as a secondary dimension to compare channels.

Common mistakes

UTM links on your own site — they overwrite the visitor's real source. Only use them on links from elsewhere.
Inconsistent names — bf2026, BlackFriday and black_friday_2026 become three campaigns.
Forgetting the medium — GA4 may show the traffic as "(not set)".

Try it now

Build your campaign links with the free UTM Builder.