Campaign traffic arriving as direct usually is not a tagging mistake. The parameters were right - they just did not survive the trip from the click to your landing page.
Open your own tagged link and look at the address bar when the page finishes loading. Still see utm_source=? The chain is clean. Gone? Every click through that link is being attributed to the wrong thing, and has been since you published it.
A UTM parameter is just text at the end of a URL. Anything that rebuilds that URL along the way can drop it, and most of the things that rebuild URLs do so for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
The most common cause. A shortener, a marketing redirect or a rule in your web server sends the visitor to the destination without carrying ?utm_source=… along. The click lands, the page loads, and the attribution is gone before analytics ever runs.
Some site builders and CMS platforms normalize URLs by removing unknown query parameters, or redirect to a canonical version of the path. The visitor never notices; your report shows direct traffic from a campaign you paid for.
In-app browsers frequently send no referrer. Without UTM parameters there is nothing else for analytics to go on, so the session is filed as direct - which is exactly why parameters matter more on social than anywhere else.
Link shortener to tracking domain to localized path to final page. Each hop is fine on its own. Somewhere in the chain one of them rebuilds the URL from scratch, and everything after that point is untagged.
You cannot control every redirect on the internet, but you can control the one your link goes through first. A short link you own is a hop you decide the behaviour of - and Revolink carries the incoming UTM parameters straight through to the destination, keeping whatever parameters the destination already had.
The same hop gives you the things a raw tagged URL never will: you can change where it points after it is published, route visitors by country or device, and see clicks as they happen instead of waiting for them to show up in analytics.
The UTM checker tells you whether the parameters themselves were correct in the first place - capitalization, duplicates, encoding.
They can, but nothing guarantees it. HTTP does not require a redirect to preserve the query string - whether it does is up to whatever software issues the redirect. Well-behaved implementations append the original query to the destination; plenty of ad-hoc redirect rules simply do not.
Either the link was never tagged, or the parameters were lost between the click and the landing page. A tagged link that arrives stripped is indistinguishable from an untagged one, which is why this is worth testing before a campaign rather than after.
Open the tagged link yourself and look at the address bar on the final page. If the utm_ parameters are still there, they survived the chain. If they vanished, something in the middle rebuilt the URL - and every click through that path is being misattributed.
Yes. Parameters on the incoming short link are carried through to the destination, so the attribution that was on the link when you published it is the attribution that reaches your analytics.
They are kept. The UTM parameters are added alongside whatever the destination URL already carried, rather than replacing its query string - which matters when the landing page uses parameters of its own for variants or pre-filled forms.
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