UTM tracking

Every Story you build is there to move people somewhere: to your website, a vacancy, a sign-up page, a webshop. UTM tracking is what lets you prove that it worked. It tells the analytics tool on the destination page where a visitor came from, so you can see exactly how much traffic and how many conversions a specific story delivered.

This article explains what UTMs are, how Intractive handles them for you automatically, and how to tag your own links so you can measure how well a story performs. No technical background needed.

What is a UTM?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. In practice it's just a few labels added to the end of a web address (URL). When someone clicks the link, those labels are sent along to the destination and show up in its analytics tool (Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Matomo, and so on).

A tagged URL looks like this:
https://www.example.com/?utm_source=summer-mailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=summer-sale

Everything before the ? is the normal web address. Everything after it are the UTM labels, separated by &. Read together, this example says: this visitor came from the summer-mailer (source), via email (medium), as part of the summer-sale campaign (campaign).

There are five labels you can use. The first three are the ones that matter most and should almost always be filled in.

How Intractive handles UTMs for you

Here's the good news: for the traffic that leaves your story, Intractive already does most of the work. UTM handling is switched on by default in your settings.

When a player leaves your story for an external destination through a Redirect block or a link inside a text block Intractive automatically tags that outgoing link with UTM parameters. Those tags then appear in the destination's analytics tool and tell its owner where the traffic came from. You decide how much control you want, and Intractive follows three simple rules.

Rule 1 — The visitor arrived without UTMs

If someone opens your story through a plain link (no utm_* labels on it), Intractive adds its own default labels to every outgoing link:

This is the sensible default for stories that aren't part of a paid campaign. The destination still sees clearly that the visit came from an Intractive experience, and which Intractive story and project it was.

Rule 2 — The visitor arrived with UTMs

If the player landed on your story through a link that already carried UTMs for example a paid social ad linking to story.intractive.app/x?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=spring Intractive forwards those exact values to every outgoing link. Its own default values are not added in this case.

The labels Intractive recognises and passes on are: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content. Only the labels that were actually present get forwarded, if the visitor arrived with just utm_source=newsletter, the outgoing link carries just utm_source=newsletter.

This is what lets you attribute a conversion all the way back to the original channel (Facebook vs. Instagram vs. Google) in your own analytics, instead of seeing every visit lumped together as coming from "Intractive".

Rule 3 — You set your own UTM on a link

If you author an outgoing link that already contains a UTM parameter yourself, your value always wins, Intractive won't overwrite it. This is exactly what you'll use to measure a specific story, and it's covered step by step in the next section.

Want to switch it off? There's a Disable outbound UTM setting. When it's on, links leave your story completely untouched, regardless of any of the rules above. Go to your story, select settings and disable the automatic UTM tracking toggle.

Where these rules apply

UTM tagging applies to the links that send a viewer out of your story:

• Buttons in a Redirect block
• Links inside a text block
• External URL buttons

It does not apply to internal navigation moving between scenes or branches inside the story itself. That's movement within the experience, not traffic leaving it, so there's nothing to attribute.

Creating your own UTM links

The rules above give you a baseline. But when you want to answer a precise question: "How many people did this story send to this page?" or “How many applicants viewed the story?” the cleanest approach is to build your own tagged link and place it in the story. Because of rule 3, the values you choose are the ones that show up in your reports.

You don't have to type UTMs by hand. Google offers a free tool that builds the link for you: the GA4 Campaign URL Builder at ga-dev-tools.google/ga4/campaign-url-builder.

Step 1 — Open the Campaign URL Builder

Go to ga-dev-tools.google/ga4/campaign-url-builder. You'll see a short form with one field per UTM label.

• Website URL:
• Campaign ID: (optional) if you run a campaign you can see the campaign ID
• Campaign source: Intractive
• Campaign medium: story
• Campaign name: recruitment
• Campaign term: job_sales_manager
• Campaign content: link_in_story

In this case we do have an Intractive story “sales manager story” in our project “recruitment”. The story is about the vacancy and the last content block contains a application form. When a viewer fills in the form and hit submit, the data is directly visible in the ATS. Because we created a UTM link and connect it with the submit button. So everyone that hits the submit button, got the UTM tags as below. Now, we can track where the applicant came from.

https://www.intractive.app/?utm_source=Intractive&utm_medium=Story&utm_campaign=Recruitment&utm_term=Job_Sales_Manager&utm_content=Link_in_story

Step 2 — Fill in the fields

Enter the website URL and the first three labels:

• Website URL — the page you want to send people to (for example your vacancy page).
• Campaign source (utm_source) — where the traffic comes from, e.g. intractive.
• Campaign medium (utm_medium) — the type of channel, e.g. story.
• Campaign name (utm_campaign) — the campaign this belongs to, e.g. recruitment.

Add Campaign term and Campaign content if you want extra detail for example the specific vacancy, or which link in the story was clicked.

Step 3 — Copy the generated link

The tool assembles the full tagged URL for you at the bottom of the page. Copy it.

Step 4 — Paste it into your story

Add that link as the destination of a Redirect block button or a link in a text block. Because you've set the UTMs yourself, Intractive keeps them exactly as they are (Rule 3).

Recruitment example

Say you want to measure how many people a story sends through to a Sales Manager vacancy on your website. You'd build a link like this and use it as the outgoing link in the story:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/vacancies/sales-manager?utm_source=intractive&utm_medium=story&utm_campaign=recruitment&utm_term=sales_manager&utm_content=link_in_story

Now, every visitor who reaches that vacancy page through your story is clearly labelled and you can tell it apart from every other traffic source in your analytics tool.

Reading the results in your analytics tool

Once your tagged links are live and people start clicking, open the analytics tool on the destination site (most commonly Google Analytics 4). Look at the Traffic acquisition report and the dimensions Session source / medium and Session campaign. There you'll find the exact values you set intractive / story , recruitment , job sales manager link in story the example above with the number of visits and conversions next to them.

Google analytics 4 have an article to find out where users are coming from.

✅ Quick checklist

• Keep values lowercase and consistent: GA4 is case-sensitive.
• Always fill in utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign.
• Use utm_term and utm_content only when you need the extra detail.
• Build links with the GA4 Campaign URL Builder instead of typing them by hand.
• The UTM you set yourself always wins over Intractive's defaults.

Updated on: 23/09/2026