URL Shortener With UTM Tracking — The Developer's Campaign Analytics Setup

As a developer, you probably hand URLs to clients, share links in documentation, and build features that involve shareable links. Adding UTM parameters and URL shortening to this workflow gives you click data you didn't have before, with minimal extra effort.

What UTM parameters are

UTM parameters are query string keys that analytics tools (Google Analytics, Plausible, and others) use to attribute traffic sources. The standard ones:

• utm_source — Where the traffic comes from (email, twitter, slack)
• utm_medium — The channel (newsletter, social, referral)
• utm_campaign — The specific campaign name
• utm_content — Differentiates similar links in the same campaign

Building UTM links in code

function buildUtmUrl(baseUrl, params) {
  const url = new URL(baseUrl);
  if (params.source) url.searchParams.set("utm_source", params.source);
  if (params.medium) url.searchParams.set("utm_medium", params.medium);
  if (params.campaign) url.searchParams.set("utm_campaign", params.campaign);
  if (params.content) url.searchParams.set("utm_content", params.content);
  return url.toString();
}

const link = buildUtmUrl("https://myapp.com/pricing", {
  source: "email",
  medium: "newsletter",
  campaign: "june-launch",
  content: "cta-button"
});
// https://myapp.com/pricing?utm_source=email&utm_medium=newsletter&...

Why you still need a URL shortener

UTM URLs are long. Very long. Pasting them in Slack, emails, or printed materials looks unprofessional and some platforms truncate them. A URL shortener creates a clean link that redirects through your long UTM URL:

// Long UTM URL → clean short link
"https://myapp.com/pricing?utm_source=email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=june-launch"
→ "https://myapp.com/go/launch"   // custom short URL

Tracking in your own backend

If you build your own redirect endpoint, you can log every click with server-side context that client-side analytics can't capture:

// Express redirect handler
app.get("/go/:code", async (req, res) => {
  const link = await db.links.findByCode(req.params.code);
  if (!link) return res.status(404).send("Not found");

  await db.clicks.create({
    linkId: link.id,
    ip: req.ip,
    userAgent: req.headers["user-agent"],
    referer: req.headers.referer,
    timestamp: new Date(),
  });

  res.redirect(301, link.destination);
});