Stop typing UTM tags by hand in launch week
Launch week is when founders post the same link in more places than any other week of the year. A launch board, a few directories, a newsletter, Reddit, X, a Slack group, a bio link, the email to the waitlist.
And it’s the week most of us tag those links worst. Somebody types utm_source=Reddit on Monday, utm_source=reddit on Tuesday, utm_source=r-saas on Wednesday. Ten days later the report shows three small rows instead of one clear one, and the question you actually cared about, which place sent people who paid, has no answer.
UTMs aren’t hard. The problem is that we treat them like something to type on the spot, when they’re really a naming system you decide once.
What goes wrong when you tag on the fly
Case splits your rows. In Google Analytics 4 the values you put in UTM tags are case sensitive in reports, so “Reddit” and “reddit” come out as two sources. Most smaller analytics tools do the same thing, they just show what you typed. Pick lowercase for everything and never think about it again.
A made-up medium ends up nowhere. GA4 sorts traffic into channels using fixed rules from Google’s default channel group doc. A medium of “social” goes to Organic Social, “email” to Email, “referral” or “link” to Referral. Something creative like utm_medium=launchpost doesn’t match any rule and lands in Unassigned, which is the one bucket nobody opens. You can still filter by it, but your channel overview will quietly lie to you.
Tagging your own internal links. If you put UTMs on a banner that goes from your blog to your pricing page, you overwrite where that visitor really came from. Tags are for links that live on other people’s pages and in other people’s inboxes. Never on your own site.
No way to tell two links on the same site apart. Say you post on X and also put the link in your X bio. Both say source x. That’s what utm_content is for, and almost nobody uses it.
Write the sheet before launch day, not during
This is the whole fix. The night before, open a plain spreadsheet with five columns: where the link goes, source, medium, campaign, content. One row per place you plan to post. Then fill it with a few boring rules:
Source is the site or list, lowercase, one word if you can: producthunt, reddit, x, linkedin, newsletter-name, waitlist.
Medium is only from a short list that GA4 understands: social, email, referral. Launch boards and directories are referral. Your waitlist email is email. Posts on Reddit or X are social. That’s it, don’t invent new ones.
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Campaign is one name for the whole launch, like launch-oct-2026, so later you can filter everything in one go and compare it with the next launch.
Content is where you split the same site: post vs bio vs comment, or first email vs reminder email.
Then you generate every link from that sheet and paste from the sheet, never from memory. When you’re tired at 11pm on launch day replying to comments, that matters more than you think.
Full disclosure, I built a free UTM link builder on Posting Dude (one of my sites) because my own launch links kept turning into this mess. It runs in the browser, nothing gets uploaded, and there’s no signup. A spreadsheet formula works fine too. The tool doesn’t matter, the sheet does.
Where you can and can’t tag
Some places let you control the link fully: your own posts, your email, your bio, a DM. Tag all of those.
On launch boards and directories you usually submit a website URL in a form. Many will keep a query string if you paste the tagged URL in, some strip it. Check the live listing once it’s up and hover the button. If the tag is gone, don’t worry, that board still shows up as a referrer on its own because the visitor arrives from its domain.
And some traffic will never be tagged no matter what you do. A friend pastes your link in a group chat, someone types your domain after hearing it on a podcast. That lands as Direct. I wrote about catching that part in asking “where did you hear about us?” in free text, because referrer reports simply can’t see word of mouth.
What to actually look at after
Don’t stop at visits. A board can send 300 visitors who bounce and a small newsletter can send 12 who sign up and stay. Filter by your launch campaign, then look at signups or the first real action per source. That’s the number that should decide where you launch next time.
Give it about a week after launch day, not the evening of. Some people bookmark and come back.
If you’re running a side project and only want the minimum setup, there’s a good breakdown of setting up analytics you’ll actually check over on SideHunt.
So here’s my question. On your last launch, which place sent the people who actually paid, and did your analytics know it, or did you find out by asking them?
