QR Codes and UTM Tagging: A Practical Guide for Marketing Teams

Untagged links arrive at your website as “direct” traffic. That tells you people turned up. It does not tell you what sent them, whether that was your newsletter, a QR code on a poster or a link in a media release. UTM tagging fixes that, and we have just published a full guide on how to do it properly, along with a ready-made register.

What untagged links cost you

Without tagging, your analytics platform sorts every visit into a rough guess. A QR code on a poster and someone who typed your web address into their phone land in the same bucket. You cannot see your best channel or your weakest one, and you cannot back a budget decision with anything more solid than a hunch.

UTM tagging replaces the guess. Every link you publish outside your own website carries four pieces of information: where the click came from, how the visitor got to you, which campaign it belongs to, and which specific item sent them.

How UTM tagging works

A tagged link is one web address with parameters added to the end. A QR code on a flyer might carry a link like this:

https://www.yoursite.com.au/whats-on?utm_source=flyer&utm_medium=qr&utm_campaign=winter-program-2026&utm_content=front-counter-flyer

The person scanning does’t notice it – but Google Analytics will. It records the visit as coming from a flyer, via a QR code, as part of your winter program campaign, from the specific flyer at the front counter.

• Source is where the click came from, such as a newsletter or a flyer.
• Medium is the type of channel, such as email, social or QR.
• Campaign is the initiative it belongs to.
• Content is the specific item, useful when more than one version is running.

QR codes need the same process

A QR code is just a way of getting someone to a tagged link without typing it. Build the page, add the UTM parameters, then generate the code from the tagged link.

Free QR generators sometimes create a “dynamic” code that routes through their own short link, which stops working the day the free trial ends. Print codes also need to be denser and larger than most people expect, because a full UTM link is a long string for a QR code to hold.

Naming conventions matter

Google Analytics treats “Facebook” and “facebook” as two different sources. It treats a campaign called winter-program-2026, and one called 2026-winter-program as two separate campaigns.

Agree on your naming conventions before you start tagging your links, write them down, assign an owner and use them consistently.

What is in the guide

The guide is written for marketing and communications teams, not developers. It covers:

• Naming conventions the whole team can follow without a reference document open
• Approved source and medium values, so one channel does not end up as three different rows
• A step-by-step QR code process, from destination link to print-ready file
• Google Analytics setup, so QR and print traffic stop disappearing into “Unassigned”
• What to do with the numbers, once they start coming in

It comes with a ready-made QR and UTM register that you can use to record your new UTM links and QR codes.

Get the guide

If your team publishes QR codes, sends a newsletter or posts to social media and cannot say with confidence which one is bringing people to your website, this is worth the read.

Threesides can configure your Google Analytics and campaign tracking, or build a Digital Marketing Dashboard that brings your website and social reporting into one place. Get in touch, and we will take it from there.

For the tool behind the tagged links in this guide, see Google’s Campaign URL Builder.