Centralized UTM Tracking System

The Challenge

Editorial, marketing, and events teams distributed across the globe were all creating UTM tracking codes independently—with inconsistent naming conventions, duplicated campaigns, and no central source of truth. These codes combined brand, campaign, and system-related attribution elements critical for ROI reporting, but without standardization, downstream analytics were unreliable and cross-team performance comparisons were essentially meaningless.

The problem compounded over time: every new team member, every new campaign, every new brand acquisition added more inconsistency to the data. The organization was investing in sophisticated analytics and reporting tools, but the data flowing into those tools was fundamentally untrustworthy.

Our Approach

We designed and built a centralized, permission-based system that standardized UTM creation across the entire organization while remaining flexible enough to accommodate the diverse needs of global teams. The goal was to make doing it the right way easier than doing it the wrong way—so adoption would be organic rather than enforced.

What We Built

1. Comprehensive UTM schema audit mapping existing tracking code creation patterns across all teams and brands, identifying inconsistencies, redundancies, naming conflicts, and gaps in the current approach.
2. Proprietary, permission-based web application for creating and managing UTM codes globally—featuring role-based access controls, standardized naming conventions, dropdown-driven parameter selection, and built-in validation to prevent malformed or duplicate codes before they're ever created.
3. Automated BigQuery synchronization pushing all UTM codes and their metadata to Google BigQuery in real-time, enabling downstream attribution reporting and ensuring a single source of truth for campaign performance data across the entire organization.

The Impact

For the first time, the organization had consistent, reliable attribution data flowing across all teams and brands. ROI reporting became trustworthy, cross-team campaign comparisons became possible, and the overhead of managing tracking codes was reduced dramatically. New team members could create properly formatted UTM codes on day one without training, and the validation layer eliminated the data quality issues that had plagued the analytics team for years.