UTM cleaning explained (keep the good params, drop the junk)
Share a link these days and it often arrives caked in parameters:
?utm_source=newsletter&fbclid=IwAR1…&_ga=2.10…. Some of that is useful. Most
isn’t.
The two kinds of parameters
- UTMs (
utm_source,utm_medium,utm_campaign,utm_term,utm_content) — you add these to attribute traffic. Keep them. - Click IDs and trackers (
fbclid,gclid,msclkid,_ga,mc_cid,igshid, …) — added by platforms to follow users. They bloat the URL, can leak how a link was found, and split your analytics across noisy variants.
Why it’s worth cleaning
- Cleaner URLs look more trustworthy when shared.
- Your analytics group properly instead of fragmenting across
fbclidvalues. - You avoid forwarding one platform’s tracking identifiers into another.
Do it automatically
You can scrub parameters by hand, but it’s the kind of thing software should do for you. Try our free query-string cleaner — paste a URL and it strips known trackers while preserving your UTMs.
When you shorten links with Einblik, this happens on the way in, so every link you create is clean by default.