Your UTM Parameters Are Being Stripped by Redirects
Tagged links that arrive untagged are one of the quietest ways to lose attribution. Here is how to test your redirects and stop losing campaign data.
You tag every campaign link properly. You use a naming convention. You are, frankly, doing better than most.
Then you open GA4 and half that traffic is sitting in Direct like it wandered in off the street.
The usual culprit is a redirect. Somewhere between the click and the page load, your carefully built parameters got thrown away.
How a redirect eats your campaign data
A UTM tagged link looks something like your domain followed by a question mark and a list of parameters describing the source, medium, and campaign.
When a browser hits a redirect, the server decides what the new address should be. If whoever configured that redirect only forwarded the path and forgot the query string, everything after the question mark disappears. The visitor still lands on the right page, so nothing looks broken. The campaign data is simply gone.
The visit gets filed as Direct, and the campaign that paid for it gets no credit.
The redirects most likely to be doing it
Non www to www, or the other way around. Almost every site has one of these.
http to https. Older redirect rules written before parameters mattered are common offenders.
Trailing slash normalisation. Quietly added by many platforms and CDNs.
Old URLs to new ones after a site migration. These are usually written in a hurry and rarely tested with parameters attached.
Link shorteners and QR codes, especially free ones, which sometimes drop parameters on the final hop.
Geo or language redirects that send visitors to a regional version of the site.
Test it in two minutes
You do not need a tool for this. You need a browser.
Take one of your real campaign links, the full thing with parameters attached.
Paste it into the address bar and press enter.
Look at the address bar after the page finishes loading.
If the parameters are still there, that path is fine. If they have vanished, you have found a redirect that is eating them.
Now repeat with the variations customers actually use. Try it without the www. Try it with http instead of https. Try it with and without a trailing slash. Try the exact link format your email platform generates, which is often not the one you pasted into the campaign builder.
People test the clean version, see it work, and declare victory. The broken path is usually the messy variation nobody thought to check.
How to fix it
The fix is on the server or platform side, and it is usually small.
Preserve the query string in every redirect rule. Most platforms have a setting or flag for this. Whoever manages your hosting will know where it lives.
Reduce redirect chains. Every extra hop is another chance to lose data. Link straight to the final address wherever you can.
Point your ads at the final URL. If your ad links to the non www version and the site redirects to www, remove the hop by linking to www directly.
Check your link shortener. Confirm it passes parameters through rather than swallowing them.
The related problem nobody expects
Google Ads auto tagging uses its own click identifier rather than UTM parameters, and it gets stripped by exactly the same broken redirects.
When that identifier disappears, Google Ads cannot connect the visit back to the click. Conversions go unattributed and your campaigns look worse than they are. If you also run offline conversion tracking, the identifier is what the whole system depends on, so a careless redirect can quietly break your entire offline reporting chain.
Fixing your redirects often improves reported performance without changing a single thing about the ads.
A sensible habit
Any time someone changes hosting, adds a CDN, migrates a site, or edits a redirect rule, retest your tagged links. It takes two minutes and it catches a problem that otherwise goes unnoticed for months.
If Direct traffic suddenly jumps in GA4, redirects are the first place to look. More on that in fixing Direct and Not Set traffic.
Need this fixed properly?
If your tagged links are arriving untagged and you cannot work out where the data disappears, that is a quick thing to trace. I set up and repair tracking for ecommerce stores and lead generation businesses, so the numbers in your ad accounts match the money in your bank account.
Have a look at what I do, or book a call and we can go through your setup together.
