Glossary · Étiqueter et diffuser

Medium (utm_medium)

A click's medium is the nature of the channel that produced it — *email*, *social*, *cpc*, *affiliate* — regardless of the precise platform. It is the category that lets you group different sources playing the same role.

Dire d’où vient un clic avant qu’il ne soit trop tard pour le savoir. The forty terms of the trade

What it is for

It serves to compare families of distribution, not places. “Does email bring in more than social?” is a medium question; “is it LinkedIn or Instagram?” is a source question. Without a medium, a report with forty sources has no higher level of reading left.

How it is named

With a deliberately poor vocabulary: five or six values, decided once, never widened case by case. The more possible values there are, the less the grouping serves any purpose — a medium per campaign amounts to having no medium at all.

The classic mistake

Writing the platform in it. *utm_medium=instagram* leaves the “medium” column meaningless and duplicates the source. The pair only works if each keeps its own level.

UTM parameters

A medium vocabulary that holds

social

cpc

referral

Five values decided once. It is the poverty of the vocabulary that makes the grouping useful.

The neighbouring word, and what it really means

What Subtraq does with it

The report breaks down by utm_medium. Mind the word: in Subtraq's screens, “by medium” means something else — the split between clicked links and scanned QR codes. The parameter itself is shown under its exact name.