Agency UTM Management
One client wants underscores. Another inherited a taxonomy from an agency three agencies ago. A third has no convention at all and will notice the moment you invent one.
The agency version of this problem is a different shape
An in-house team has one taxonomy to keep straight and everybody in the room agrees to it eventually. An agency has as many taxonomies as it has clients, none of which it fully controls, several of which contradict each other, and all of which are enforced by the same handful of people building links on a deadline.
That changes what good looks like. A single house convention is exactly the wrong answer: it will be right for the two clients who had nothing and wrong for everyone who already has reporting built on their own scheme. What you need instead is one place where each client's rules live, and a builder that applies whichever set applies to the work in front of you.
It also changes who carries the risk. When a campaign is mis-tagged in-house, the team loses a quarter of clean reporting. When an agency does it, the client's numbers are wrong, the agency finds out in a review meeting, and the conversation is not about taxonomy.
How agency structure maps onto TagPipes
TagPipes is not an agency-only product. It has a company and property structure that an agency happens to fit neatly into.
| Your structure | In TagPipes | Why it matters here |
|---|---|---|
| A client | A company | Everything below it is scoped to that client. Work for one client is not visible from another |
| A client's website, app or region | A property | Links and campaigns live under a property, so a client with three sites keeps three sets rather than one mixed pile |
| That client's naming rules | A naming template on the property or the company | A property can have its own template. A property with none falls back to the company's, and a company with none gets a standard five-field UTM template |
| The account team | Users on that company | Who can build and edit links is decided per company, not globally |
A property with its own template keeps it: it is not overwritten by the company default. That sounds obvious and is the sort of thing that goes wrong quietly, so it is worth stating.
What actually reduces the work
Described as Relay behaves today. Anything not built is not on this page.
The client's rules live with the client
The naming template sits on the property, so the person building a link does not need to remember which client uses underscores. The form asks for what that client's template asks for.
The rules apply at creation
A required field missing means the link is not created. Nobody has to review a junior's links before a send, because the gate has already done the check that a review would have done.
Handover is a link, not a spreadsheet
When an account changes hands, the new person opens the library and sees every link that exists for that client, with what it points at and when it was last touched.
Duplicates are refused across the account
Two people on the same account cannot quietly create the same tagged link to the same page. The second attempt is refused and points at the first.
Campaigns carry an owner and a team
A campaign record holds who owns it and which team, which is the question asked most often three months later when something needs explaining.
Dates read the way people mean them
A campaign ending on the 31st runs through the 31st, and a record created at nine in the evening is dated that evening in the property's timezone rather than the next day in UTC.
Taking over a client's tagging
The order that causes the fewest arguments.
1. Find out what they already have
Pull a few months of campaign values out of their analytics before proposing anything. The real convention is whatever is in the data, which is usually not what the document says. This is also the moment you find the four spellings of the same campaign.
2. Write down the rules they are actually following
Not the rules they should follow. Getting the existing scheme recorded accurately is worth more than improving it, because it is what their historical reporting is built on.
3. Change one thing, not everything
A taxonomy change breaks the comparison to prior periods. If a change is genuinely needed, make it once, at a period boundary, and tell whoever reads the reports before they notice it themselves.
4. Put the rules where the link is made
A template on the property means the next person to build a link follows the scheme without having read any of this. That is the whole point, and it is the step most handovers skip.
Frequently asked questions
More on managing campaign links
The rest of the Relay pages, and the free builder for when you only need one URL.
- UTM Campaign ManagerFrom building single URLs to managing a campaign's links in one place.
- Campaign Link ManagerFind, reuse and keep track of the links a campaign is already using.
- UTM GovernanceAn agreed naming template, enforced when the link is created.
- UTM BuilderBuild one tagged campaign URL. Free, no signup, nothing leaves your browser.
- Campaign URL BuilderThe same builder, with the naming decisions spelled out before you tag.
- GA4 UTM BuilderWhere each parameter lands in a GA4 report, and what GA4 does with it.
- TagPipes for agenciesHow agencies use the rest of the platform.
One taxonomy per client, kept where the links are made.
Build a campaign URL for a client in the free builder, then save it into Relay from the result. The destination decides the company and the property, so the account is set up from the link itself.
Start with a free campaign URLGenerating a URL is free and needs no account. You register only when you save one into Relay.