UTMs are boring. They’re not creative. They don’t feel strategic. And they rarely get discussed in planning meetings until something goes wrong.
Yet in telehealth, UTMs are one of the fastest ways to fix the most common executive question we hear: “Where did these clients actually come from?”
When attribution breaks down in a regulated, multi-step healthcare journey, the issue is rarely a lack of tools. It’s almost always a lack of standards. Campaigns are tagged differently across teams. Agencies bring their own naming habits. Channels blur together. Reporting dashboards fill up with near-duplicate labels that can’t be rolled up cleanly. Trust in the numbers erodes.
In this article, we’ll walk through a telehealth-friendly UTM standard and, more importantly, how to keep teams aligned with it over time. This is not a technical implementation guide. You won’t learn platform-specific auto-tagging rules, configuration steps, or analytics setup instructions. Those details belong in controlled documentation, not public blog posts.
What you will learn is how to think about UTMs as a governance problem, not a tagging problem, and how a simple, human-readable naming system can restore clarity across your marketing and analytics reporting.
Key Takeaways
Why UTMs matter more in telehealth
UTMs matter across industries, but in telehealth, they carry more weight than most teams realize. That’s because telehealth attribution isn’t just about a click. It’s about understanding intent, trust, and progression across a journey that rarely happens in a single session.
Multi-step journeys amplify attribution errors
A typical telehealth conversion doesn’t look like an ecommerce purchase. Prospective patients often encounter a brand multiple times before taking action. They may click a paid social ad, return later through search, open an email reminder, and finally complete onboarding days or weeks later.
When UTMs are inconsistent, each touchpoint becomes harder to interpret. A single campaign name spelled three different ways can fragment reporting. Slight differences in source or medium labels can cause traffic to land in unexpected buckets in GA4 campaign tracking. Over time, attribution errors compound.
In telehealth, these errors aren’t just annoying; they affect budget decisions, compliance conversations, and growth strategy. When leadership can’t trust channel performance reports, every downstream decision slows down.
Trust breaks when reporting labels are inconsistent
Analytics is ultimately a trust system. Executives don’t need to know how UTMs work at a technical level, but they do need confidence that “paid social” means the same thing this month as it did last quarter.
Inconsistent UTM naming conventions undermine that trust. One team reports strong performance from email; another reports email underperforming. Neither is technically wrong; they’re just using different labels. Over time, stakeholders stop believing the data and revert to gut decisions.
A clear telehealth UTM strategy doesn’t just improve reporting accuracy. It preserves credibility across teams.
The minimum UTM fields to standardize
One of the biggest mistakes we see is overengineering UTM structures. Telehealth teams sometimes try to capture everything in a campaign URL, creating long, fragile strings that few people understand and even fewer maintain correctly.
In practice, you only need to standardize a small core set of fields to get reliable, audit-friendly reporting.
Source, medium, campaign, and when content matters
At a conceptual level, UTMs answer three simple questions:
- Where did this traffic come from?
- What type of channel delivered it?
- Why was this campaign running?
Source, medium, and campaign form the backbone of that story. When those three are consistently named, most channel and campaign reporting becomes dramatically clearer. In GA4 campaign tracking, these fields enable traffic to roll up cleanly into meaningful views.
Additional labels, such as content-level detail, can be useful in specific contexts, such as differentiating creative variants or placements, but they should never compromise the clarity of the core fields. If optional fields aren’t governed carefully, they become another source of reporting noise.
The goal isn’t maximum detail. It has a consistent meaning.
What to avoid (random capitalization, synonyms, messy labels)
Most UTM problems aren’t strategic; they’re stylistic. Small inconsistencies create big downstream issues.
Random capitalization causes duplicate rows in reports. Synonyms fragment channels that should be unified. Messy labels that mix strategy, creative, and audience information become impossible to interpret months later.
In healthcare marketing, where teams change and campaigns run seasonally, UTMs must survive beyond the person who created them. If a label wouldn’t make sense to someone new joining the team six months from now, it’s probably too clever.
A practical naming convention that telehealth teams can maintain
The best UTM naming convention is not necessarily the most detailed. It’s the one your team will actually use correctly under pressure.
Human-readable, consistent, and audit-friendly
In telehealth, UTMs should be written in plain language. A non-technical stakeholder should be able to look at a campaign name and understand what it represents without opening a spreadsheet or asking for clarification.
Consistency matters more than specificity. A smaller, well-maintained vocabulary of sources and mediums is far more valuable than an exhaustive taxonomy that no one follows. This is especially true for paid social UTMs and email UTM tagging, where campaigns launch quickly and often involve multiple contributors.
Audit-friendliness is the final test. If you can’t review historical campaigns and confidently group them without manual cleanup, the system needs simplification.
How to handle agencies and vendors
Agencies are not the enemy of UTM consistency, but they are a common source of drift. Each partner brings their own habits, tools, and defaults unless you set expectations early.
In a telehealth UTM strategy, agencies should be required to follow your naming standards rather than define their own. That doesn’t mean micromanaging their execution; it means providing a clear framework for them to work within.
When standards are documented and enforced, agencies usually welcome the clarity. It reduces back-and-forth, prevents rework, and protects everyone from attribution disputes later.
Governance: how UTMs stay consistent over time
Most teams focus on creating UTM rules. Fewer teams focus on how those rules hold up in real-world marketing operations.
Governance is what turns a good idea into a durable system.
One owner, one document, one change process
UTM standards should have a single owner. Not a committee. Not a shared inbox. One accountable role is responsible for maintaining definitions and approving changes.
Those standards should reside in a single authoritative document, accessible to everyone who touches campaigns. When updates are needed, there should be a clear change process that prioritizes backward compatibility and reporting continuity.
Without ownership, standards decay. With ownership, they evolve safely.
QA checkpoints before campaigns launch
Quality assurance doesn’t have to be technical to be effective. Simple review checkpoints before campaigns go live can prevent months of reporting confusion later.
In healthcare marketing, this kind of channel reporting hygiene is part of risk management. It protects not just the accuracy of analytics but also internal alignment and external credibility.
How Bask Health supports UTM governance for clients
At Bask Health, we see UTMs as part of a broader measurement system, not an isolated tactic. Telehealth analytics only works when campaign tagging, reporting, and interpretation all speak the same language.
Measurement dictionary alignment across teams
We help clients align UTMs with a shared measurement dictionary that defines the meaning of channels, campaigns, and outcomes across the organization. This reduces ambiguity and ensures that marketing, growth, and leadership teams interpret reports consistently.
The result is cleaner attribution, fewer reporting debates, and more confident decision-making.
Visit bask.fyi
Platform-specific setup, configuration, and reporting workflows are documented for clients in bask.fyi.
FAQ
Should we use UTMs on internal links?
In most cases, UTMs are designed for external acquisition tracking, not internal navigation. Using them internally can overwrite attribution data and create confusion in GA4 campaign tracking. The better question is what insight you’re trying to gainand whether UTMs are the right tool for that job.
How do we handle organic social and influencers?
Organic social and influencer traffic still benefits from consistent source and medium standards, even when campaigns feel less structured. The key is resisting the urge to invent new labels for every partnership or post. Consistency enables comparison over time, which is what makes the data useful.
What’s the difference between UTMs and GA4 channel groups?
UTMs describe how traffic is tagged at the campaign level. GA4 channel groups determine how that traffic is categorized and reported at a higher level. When UTM naming conventions are clean, channel grouping becomes more reliable. When UTMs are chaotic, channel definitions struggle to compensate.
Conclusion
UTMs will never be exciting. But in telehealth, they are foundational.
A clear, well-governed telehealth UTM strategy brings order to attribution, restores trust in reporting, and gives teams a shared language for growth. It doesn’t require complex tooling or heavy process, just disciplined naming, clear ownership, and respect for how data is actually used.
When UTMs are treated as infrastructure instead of afterthoughts, reporting chaos fades. What remains is clarityand the confidence to act on it.
References
- Google. (n.d.). About data retention in Google Analytics 4 properties. Analytics Help. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11242870
- Google. (n.d.). About consent mode in Google Analytics. Analytics Help. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10917952
