Black Friday is on 27 November. If you’re sending sale emails, posting offers or running adverts, add UTM parameters to every link before it goes out. Then your statistics show which email, post or advert brought each visit, and in a WooCommerce shop, which one brought each sale.

Without them, most of that traffic arrives looking the same. A click from your newsletter, for example, often shows up as direct traffic or as your email provider, with nothing to say which email it was.

⚡ UTM parameters for Black Friday: the short answer

• A UTM tag is a label added to the end of a link, such as ?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=black-friday-2026. It doesn’t change where the link goes.
• Always use three: source (who sent the visitor), medium (what kind of link) and campaign (which promotion).
• Decide your names before you start, write them down, and use lowercase every time. Newsletter and newsletter can end up as two different rows in your reports.
• Tag links that point to your site from somewhere else: emails, social posts, adverts, your Google Business Profile. Don’t tag links between your own pages.
• Never put personal details in a tag, such as an email address. Anyone can see the tags in the address bar.
• After the sale, your campaign report shows the visits from each tag, and with a shop, the orders and revenue.

🏷️ What a UTM tag looks like

A tagged link is your normal link with a question mark and some labels on the end:

https://yourshop.co.uk/black-friday/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=black-friday-2026&utm_content=early-access

There are five standard labels. Google’s own guidance is to always use the first three (Google Analytics Help):

The page still opens normally. The tags are just extra information your statistics read when the visitor arrives.

📋 Make a naming plan first

The most common problem with UTM tags is inconsistency. The same email tagged Newsletter one week and newsletter the next, or black-friday and blackfriday, splits your results across several rows, and the totals no longer add up to anything useful.

A short plan, written down before you send anything, fixes that. For a small shop’s Black Friday, it might look like this:

Keep to lowercase, use hyphens instead of spaces, and reuse the same campaign name everywhere, so everything about the sale sits together in your reports.

Here’s what inconsistency looks like in real data. This is the campaign report from one of my own sites, a music website, since September. The same directory sent visitors through links tagged buildornot/ and buildornot, and because of one slash they appear as two separate sources:

That directory added its own tags to its links to my site, which some sites do. The newsletter row is mine: source brevo, medium email, campaign rfmh-deals-2026-10.

🔗 How to add UTM parameters to a link

By hand. Copy the page address, add ? and then the tags, joined with &. If the address already has a ? in it, start the tags with & instead. Paste the finished link into a browser once to check the page still opens.

In your email service. Many email services can add UTM tags to every link in a campaign for you. Check the campaign’s tracking settings and make sure the names it uses match your plan. If they don’t, turn the option off and tag the links yourself.

In adverts. Ad platforms usually have a box for URL parameters, so you set the tags once for the whole advert or campaign. In Google Ads it’s called the Final URL suffix (Google Ads Help). Google Ads also adds its own click code to links. GreenOrb Statistics reads UTM tags, not that code, so add your UTM tags as well.

On social media and your Google Business Profile. Paste the tagged link as the post’s link or button. Short links work too, as long as the address they lead to carries the tags.

🚫 What not to tag

• Links between your own pages. A tag tells your statistics where the visitor came from. On your own site, the answer is always “your own site”, so internal tags only muddle the reports.
• Personal details. Never put a customer’s name or email address in a tag. The tags show in the address bar, can be copied and shared, and end up in your reports.
• Anything you’ll forget. If a tag isn’t on your written plan, it’ll be hard to make sense of in December.

📊 What you’ll see after the sale

With GreenOrb Statistics, the free version’s All UTM Campaigns report lists every combination of source, medium and campaign it has seen, with visits and visitors for each. Click one, and you get that campaign on its own: a daily chart compared with the period before, and the list of visits it brought.

If you run a WooCommerce shop with GreenOrb Statistics Pro, the WooCommerce report adds revenue by campaign: the number of orders, the revenue and the average order value for each source, medium and campaign. An order is credited to the campaign of the visit in which the customer bought. If someone clicks your email on Monday, comes back by typing your address on Friday and buys, that sale counts as direct, not as the email.

WooCommerce also has its own Order Attribution feature, which records the source, medium and campaign on each order and shows it as the order’s Origin (WooCommerce documentation). It’s also credited to the last click, and it uses cookies in the visitor’s browser. What it doesn’t show is the visits that didn’t buy, so you can’t see which email brought lots of browsers but no sales. A campaign report gives you both.

🗓️ When to do it

• Now: write your naming plan.
• As you build each email, post and advert: tag every link, and test one in a browser.
• On the day: check the campaign report shows the first visits arriving under the right names.
• After the sale: compare campaigns. GreenOrb Statistics keeps the campaign data in your own WordPress database, not on someone else’s servers.

For the rest of your preparation, from stock and coupons to a test order, see the Black Friday checklist for WooCommerce.

❓ Frequently asked questions

What are UTM parameters?
Labels added to the end of a link, such as utm_source=newsletter, that tell your statistics where a visitor came from. They don’t change the page the link opens.

Which UTM parameters do I need?
Source, medium and campaign, every time. Add content when you have several links in one email or several versions of an advert, and term for paid search keywords.

Are UTM parameters case sensitive?
In Google Analytics, yes: Google and google are counted separately. Using lowercase everywhere avoids the problem in any tool.

Do I need a plugin to read UTM tags?
You need a statistics tool that reads them. Most do, including the free version of GreenOrb Statistics, which shows them in its All UTM Campaigns report.

Can visitors see UTM tags?
Yes. They show in the address bar after someone clicks. That’s why they should never contain personal details.

Sources

• Google Analytics Help, Collect campaign data with custom URLs.
• Google Ads Help, Final URL suffix.
• WooCommerce, Order attribution tracking.
• GreenOrb Statistics 1.0.7 code, checked on 6 November 2026.