Google Analytics Audit Test #

28

All Campaign Names Are Human Readable

Why It Matters:

Critical to understanding where your traffic is coming from and assigning appropriate credit.

Industries:

All

Checks For:

Utility

How powerful is your current implementation?

Insight Category:

Attribution

Can you tell which marketing efforts are working?

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Background

A GA4 audit is essential for uncovering missing insights—key data points that organizations don't yet know and can act upon. A well-done audit evaluates both behavioral tracking and traffic attribution, ensuring each is accurate and useful. It also assesses whether the data collected truly supports business decisions and reporting.

Test Detail

This test checks whether all campaign names (utm_campaign) used in GA4 are human readable, meaning they clearly describe the campaign’s purpose, audience, or content without relying on cryptic codes, IDs, or machine-generated strings.

Non-human-readable names like cmp1234, abcde, or campaign456 make it:

  • Difficult to analyze marketing performance in GA4
  • Confusing for non-technical stakeholders to interpret reports
  • Risky for long-term data consistency and collaboration across teams

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How to Conduct This Test

Basic Tests

  • In GA4 > Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition, or Explore, review:
    • Dimension: Session campaign
    • Look for campaign names that are:
    • Random character strings
    • Contain only numbers or abbreviations with no context
    • Duplicated across different traffic sources

Advanced QA

In BigQuery, you can query the most common campaign values and flag those that look non-human-readable using this query:

    SELECT campaign, COUNT(*) as sessions
    FROM `your_dataset.events_*`
    WHERE campaign IS NOT NULL
    GROUP BY campaign
    ORDER BY sessions DESC
  • If the names are hard to read or interpret, it’s time for a naming cleanup.

Want to flag these automatically? Run our Instant Audit

Or hire a pro to help standardize your campaign tracking and ensure that your campaign metadata is useful and can be used to generate insights.

How To Fix

  • Implement a campaign naming convention that includes:
    • Platform (google, linkedin, etc.)
    • Objective or funnel stage (awareness, retargeting, etc.)
    • Content or product theme (spring_sale, webinar_signup, etc.)
  • Update ad platform templates to auto-apply readable utm_campaign values
  • Train internal teams and vendors to follow the same format for all campaign links
  • Avoid using internal IDs or CRM codes as the primary campaign name in UTM tags
  • Hire a pro to document, enforce, and audit your UTM strategy for clarity, consistency, and insight.

Tips from a Google Analytics Consultant

Focus on Insights

Every Google Analytics audit should result in a plan for more insights.

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An insight is:

  • something you don't know
  • and can act on to improve performance

The Goal

Identify and remove insight blockers. Don't get tempted to track things you can't act on!

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