Name links so your team can find them later
A naming rule for short links, QR codes and UTM values that survives a growing team — lowercase, hyphens, a fixed order, and one owner for the vocabulary.
The link you create today is one someone else has to recognize in eight months, in a list of two thousand. A naming rule costs ten minutes to agree on and saves the reorganization nobody has time for.
Availability
- Plan: every plan. This is a convention, not a feature.
- Where: the Short Link key, the Tags field, and the UTM values inside your destination URL.
Four rules that every source agrees on
- Lowercase everything. Analytics tools treat
Facebookandfacebookas two different sources, which splits one campaign into two rows for no reason. - Use hyphens, not spaces or underscores. A space arrives as
%20or+depending on who sent it, and becomes yet another row. - Fix the order of the parts and never vary it.
channel-campaign-audienceread the same way every time is what makes a list scannable. - Keep a controlled vocabulary with one owner. Decide once whether the channel is
emailornewsletter, write it down, and let one person approve additions.
The fourth rule is the one teams skip and the one that actually decides whether the other three survive.
A shape that works
For the short link key, three parts are usually enough:
go.example.com/blackfriday-instagram-stories
For tags, one dimension per tag rather than one tag per link:
- channel —
email,instagram,whatsapp - campaign —
black-friday-2026 - format —
story,feed,print
That way a report can ask for one dimension at a time, which is the entire point of tagging. See Use tags to filter links, QR codes and pages.
UTM values follow the same rules
The UTM parameters live inside your destination URL and are what your analytics tool groups by, so an inconsistent value there is more expensive than an inconsistent link key. Same four rules, same vocabulary, and the campaign name should match the tag you used in CodeQR — the two lists lining up is what lets you compare a CodeQR report with a Google Analytics one without translating.
What not to put in a name
- Dates that will confuse later.
promo-2026-08is fine;promo-newis not, because everything is new once. - Internal jargon nobody outside the team knows. The person searching in a year may be a new hire.
- Anything you would not want a customer to read. Short link keys are visible in the address bar, and people do read them.
Verify it works
Search your links list for one part of the convention — a channel, a campaign — and see whether the result is the set you expected. If it is not, the convention is not being followed and no tooling will fix that. Find a link you created months ago covers what the search actually matches.
Troubleshooting
We already have a thousand links with no rule
Do not rename them; the URLs are in circulation and renaming a key breaks every copy already shared. Apply the convention from today, and use tags to retrofit grouping onto the old ones — tags can be added without touching the link.
The same campaign appears twice in reports
Two spellings of one value, usually differing in case or a separator. Standardize the value going forward and edit the UTM values on the links that matter.
Everyone invents their own names
That is the vocabulary problem, not a naming one. One person owns the list; additions go through them.
Should the folder name be part of the link name
No — the folder already answers that. Repeating it in the key makes the address longer without adding information. See Choose between folders and tags to organize links.