Tracking templates are the least glamorous part of attribution and the part that decides whether any of it works. This guide is for whoever manages the ad accounts. It covers what needs to be on your URLs, why consistency matters more than detail, and what happens when it is missing.
What the tags are for
Two different things travel on an advertising URL and they do different jobs.
Click identifiers are added by the platform. Meta adds one, Google adds one, and they identify that specific click within that platform. They are the strongest signal available, because they are generated by the platform itself and cannot be mistyped.
UTM parameters are added by you. They describe the source, medium and campaign in your own vocabulary. They are weaker, because they depend on human consistency, and they are essential, because they are the only thing that describes channels the platforms do not know about.
Tatheon resolves the journey using both, plus its own first party session identifier from the storefront pixel. The click identifier ties the session to the platform. The session identifier carries it through the checkout. The UTM parameters make it readable.
Consistency beats completeness
The most common mistake is elaborate tagging applied inconsistently.
If one campaign uses facebook, another uses Facebook and a third uses fb,
they become three channels in every report, and every comparison across them
is wrong. That single inconsistency does more damage than missing a parameter
entirely.
Agree a convention and apply it mechanically. Lowercase everything. Use the same
word for the same thing everywhere. Decide once whether paid social is
paid_social or cpc and never mix them. Write it down somewhere the next
person will find it, because the convention outlives whoever set it.
What to put where
Source is the platform: facebook, google, klaviyo. Medium is the type of
traffic: cpc, email, organic_social. Campaign is your campaign name, and
this is where most of the useful detail belongs.
Use the platform’s dynamic fields rather than typing values by hand. Both major platforms can insert the campaign, ad set and ad names automatically at click time, which means the tags stay correct when something is renamed and nobody has to remember to update them.
Content and term are optional and worth using for creative and audience identifiers when you want to slice by them later.
Apply templates at account level
Both major platforms let you set a tracking template once at account level rather than per campaign.
Do that. Per campaign templates are correct on the day they are created and degrade from then on, because every new campaign is a chance to forget. An account level template applies to everything, including campaigns created by somebody who has never read this guide.
What breaks, and how you will know
The symptom of missing tags is low match confidence in the attribution section. Revenue is still reported correctly, because that comes from the store, but a large share of it cannot be tied to any journey.
If match confidence is low, work through three things in order. Confirm the storefront pixel is installed on the live theme. Confirm click identifiers are arriving, which means the tracking template is applied at account level. Confirm the checkout is not stripping parameters, which some third party checkout apps do.
Fixing those raises confidence far more than changing the attribution model. A model applied to a minority of your revenue is describing a sample, not your business.
What to do first
Check whether your account level templates exist at all. In many accounts they do not, and every campaign is relying on whatever was pasted in at creation. Setting them once fixes attribution for everything you run from that point on.