UTM tagging adds standardized query parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content) to outbound URLs so analytics platforms can attribute traffic to a specific source, medium, and campaign.
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Without UTM tags, all paid traffic from a product feed lands on the site looking the same as direct or organic traffic — analytics cannot tell that a click came from Google Shopping rather than Meta Catalog. UTM parameters fix this by tagging every link in the feed with source, medium, and campaign identifiers. Google Analytics 4 reads the parameters and routes the session to the right attribution bucket.
The five standard parameters are utm_source (where the traffic came from — google, meta, tiktok), utm_medium (the channel type — cpc, organic, email), utm_campaign (the campaign name), utm_term (paid keyword), and utm_content (creative variant). For product feeds, the convention is utm_source=channel-name & utm_medium=cpc & utm_campaign=feed-name & utm_content=product-id. This lets GA4 break out performance per channel, per feed, and per product without manual tagging.
Google Ads auto-tags clicks with gclid by default, but the gclid is opaque to GA4 — UTM parameters are still recommended for cross-platform consistency. Meta uses fbclid similarly. FeedArc applies UTM templates per channel on every export, so the link in the feed is always pre-tagged. The template is configurable per feed and supports product-level placeholders (e.g. utm_content={product.id}).
Where the concept above breaks down or needs careful application — written honestly so you can make better decisions.
The GA4 reference for utm_source / utm_medium / utm_campaign / utm_id semantics and how tagged URLs surface in Traffic acquisition reports.
Custom labels 0 through 4 are five free-text fields in Google Shopping feeds used to segment products for bidding — typically populated from Google Analytics 4 performance data so high-revenue products can be bid on differently from low-revenue ones.
A product feed is a structured file (XML, CSV, TSV, or JSON) that lists every product in your catalog with the fields advertising and marketplace platforms need to display them.
Feed rules are transformations applied to a product catalog before export — mapping internal field names to channel-specific schemas, filtering out ineligible products, enriching data, or applying conditional logic per channel.
FeedArc handles utm tagging — and 31 other feed concerns — automatically. Free to start, no credit card needed.
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