Do I need to register UTMs in GA4?

Updated October 8, 2026 by the UTM Builder team at Limner.

No, you don’t. There’s no screen in GA4 to register a campaign before you use it. GA4 reads the utm_ parameters from the URL itself when the page with the Google tag loads, and those values are what source, medium and campaign in your reports come from.

How GA4 finds out

When someone opens a link like this one, the Google tag on the page sends the full URL along with the first event of the visit:

Google’s help on sessions says the session_start event carries the information that determines the session’s attribution, such as the gclid, UTM parameters and the referrer. There’s no registration, no approval and no list of campaigns to create first.

You also don’t need to create a Google Ads campaign or have a budget to measure a link with UTMs. Google Ads only comes in when the ad runs on Google, and in that case the click is identified by the gclid from auto-tagging.

What needs to be right

• The GA4 tag installed on the landing page. Without it nothing is recorded, with or without UTMs.
• Always utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. Google asks for all three, and whatever is missing shows up as (not set).
• Lowercase values, always written the same way. To GA4, google and Google are different values and become two rows in the report.
• The URL arriving intact. A redirect along the way, from http to https or from a link shortener, can strip the parameters, and the visit falls into (direct) / (none).
• Only one question mark. If the link already has a parameter, the next ones are added with &.

Where to check and how long to wait

To see the visit right away, open the Realtime report and click the link yourself. For the campaign, go to Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition, and switch the primary dimension to Session source / medium or Session campaign, which are the options Google’s help points to for custom campaigns.

Don’t be surprised if today’s data is incomplete. Google’s page on data freshness says processing can take 24 to 48 hours and that the numbers can change during that period. Testing at 10:00 a.m. and looking at the acquisition report at 10:05 a.m. often gives the false impression that the UTM didn’t work.

What about utm_id?

utm_id doesn’t need to be registered either. It becomes more useful if you import cost data for campaigns outside Google: the file you upload to GA4 must contain the same utm_id, utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign values used in your links. To measure visits, the three required parameters are enough.