How to Find UTM Campaigns in Google Analytics 4

Trying to find your UTM campaign data in Google Analytics 4 can feel like digging for buried treasure without a map. You know the insights are in there, but GA4's interface can be overwhelming if you don't know exactly where to look. This tutorial will show you precisely where to find your campaign data, how to build custom reports for deeper analysis, and how to start turning that data into real marketing insights.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Where to Find Your Campaign Data: The Traffic Acquisition Report

The quickest way to get a glimpse of your campaign performance is within the standard reporting interface. GA4 bundles campaign data into the "Traffic acquisition" report, which shows you where your users are coming from. While this is a good starting point, you often need to adjust the default view to see your specific UTM parameters.

Step-by-Step Guide to Finding UTM Data in Standard Reports

Follow these steps to locate your campaign data:

1. Navigate to Reports on the left-hand navigation panel.
2. Under the "Life Cycle" collection, click on Acquisition, then select Traffic acquisition.
3. By default, this report groups traffic by "Session default channel grouping." This is useful for a high-level view but doesn't show your UTM campaigns. To change this, click the small down arrow next to "Session default channel grouping."
4. A dropdown menu will appear. In the search box, type "campaign" and select Session campaign.

The report will now display a list of all the campaign names you’ve used in your utm_campaign parameter, along with key metrics like Users, Sessions, Engaged sessions, and Conversions. You've found your campaign data!

Going Deeper with Secondary Dimensions

Seeing the campaign name is helpful, but what about the ad content (utm_content) or specific keywords (utm_term) you were testing? This is where secondary dimensions come in.

While viewing your campaign report, click the blue "+" sign next to the primary dimension column. Search for and select the dimension you want to add. Here are a few valuable secondary dimensions to analyze your campaigns:

• Session manual ad content: This pulls from your utm_content parameter, perfect for seeing which ad variation or link placement performed best. For example, you can see if your "blue_button_ad" outperformed your "red_button_ad."
• Session manual term: This corresponds to the utm_term parameter, which is essential for analyzing which keywords in your paid search campaigns are driving the most valuable traffic.
• Device category: Pitting your campaigns against device type can reveal interesting patterns. You might discover your "summer-sale" email campaign converts exceptionally well on desktop but falls flat on mobile.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Building a Custom Campaign Performance Report in Explanations

While standard reports are a great starting point, the real power of GA4 lies in its "Explore" section. Here, you can build completely custom reports from scratch to analyze exactly what matters to your business. This allows you to combine dimensions and metrics in ways that standard reports don't, giving you a uniquely tailored view of your marketing efforts.

Let's build a dedicated campaign report that focuses on your UTM parameters and connects them directly to your business goals, like revenue and conversions.

Step 1: Create a New Exploration

In the left-hand navigation, click on Explore. On the Explorations dashboard, click the "+" icon or the "Blank" template to create a new exploration. Give it a descriptive name like "UTM Campaign Performance Details."

Step 2: Import Your Dimensions

Dimensions are the what you are measuring — the descriptive attributes of your data. In the "Variables" column on the left, click the "+" sign next to "Dimensions."

Use the search bar to find and import the following dimensions. Check the box next to each one and then click the blue "Import" button at the top right:

• Session campaign: Your utm_campaign name.
• Session source / medium: The utm_source and utm_medium.
• Session manual ad content: Your utm_content for A/B testing ad variations.
• Session manual term: The utm_term for keyword tracking.
• Session default channel group: The broader channel like 'Paid Search' or 'Email'.

Step 3: Import Your Metrics

Metrics are the numbers — the quantitative measurements of your data. In the "Variables" column, click the "+" sign next to "Metrics."

Search for and import the metrics that are most important to your marketing goals. Here’s a solid starting list:

• Sessions: The total number of sessions.
• Engaged sessions: The number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews.
• Engagement rate: Engaged sessions / Sessions. A great way to gauge content quality.
• Conversions: The number of times users triggered a conversion event (e.g., form_submit, purchase).
• Total revenue: If you're an ecommerce business, this is a non-negotiable metric.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Step 4: Build Your Report

Now, it's time to assemble your report in the "Tab Settings" column. Drag and drop the dimensions and metrics you imported from the "Variables" panel into the appropriate fields:

• Rows: Drag Session campaign here. If you want to drill down further, you can add Session manual ad content right below it. This will show you a breakdown of your ad content within each campaign.
• Columns: This often works best for segmenting by something like device or channel group, but for now, we'll leave it blank to keep the view simple.
• Values: Drag all your metrics here: Sessions, Engaged sessions, Engagement rate, Conversions, and Total revenue. You can reorder them to your liking.

Instantly, you’ll see a detailed table appear on the right side of your screen. This custom report gives you a comprehensive view of how each of your UTM-tagged campaigns directly contributes to sessions, engagement, conversions, and revenue — all in one place.

Practical Analysis Tips and Common Pitfalls

Finding the data is only half the battle. Now you need to make sense of it. Here are a few tips for analyzing your reports and steering clear of common UTM tracking mistakes.

Filtering for a Specific Campaign

If you have dozens of active campaigns, your report can get noisy. To focus on a single campaign, scroll down to the "Filters" section in the "Tab Settings." Drag the Session campaign dimension into the filter box. Then, select the "matches exactly" condition and enter the name of the campaign you want to analyze (e.g., "spring_promo_2024"). The report will instantly update to show data only for that campaign.

The Number One Enemy: Inconsistent Naming

One of the easiest ways for your campaign data to become a mess is through inconsistent naming conventions. GA4 is case-sensitive and treats each unique name as a completely separate entry. For instance, GA4 will see Facebook, facebook, and facebook.com as three entirely different sources.

This means your data for a single campaign can be fragmented across several rows:

• utm_campaign=summer-sale
• utm_campaign=Summer_Sale
• utm_campaign=q3_summer_sale

To avoid this, create a simple and clear UTM naming convention for your whole team to use. A shared spreadsheet is often the best solution. Decide on a standard format (e.g., all lowercase, using underscores instead of spaces) and stick to it religiously. Consistency is the secret to clean, reliable campaign data.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Solving the Mystery of "(not set)" Data

Seeing (not set) appear in your campaign reports can be frustrating. This generally means traffic arrived at your site without campaign parameters, but Google couldn't classify it into a default channel group either. This often happens because:

• Missing UTM tags: An email or social post was sent without the proper UTM parameters at the end of the URL.
• Auto-tagging overrides: If you're running Google Ads, make sure auto-tagging is enabled. If it isn't, and you haven't manually tagged your Final URLs, campaign data won't pass into GA4 correctly.
• Redirects stripping parameters: Sometimes, URL shorteners or website redirects can accidentally strip UTM parameters from a URL before the user lands on your site. Always test your links to make sure the parameters persist.

Final Thoughts

Locating, reporting on, and analyzing your UTM campaign data in GA4 is fundamental to understanding your marketing ROI. By moving beyond default reports and building custom explorations, you gain a clear, detailed view of which campaigns drive growth and which are draining your budget, allowing you to make smarter decisions over time.

Ultimately, the manual process of logging into GA4, building custom reports, and filtering through data is still a time-consuming task to perform across all your marketing channels. At Graphed, we created a way to skip these manual steps entirely. By connecting your tools (like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Shopify) once, we enable you to instantly build dashboards and get insights simply by asking questions in plain English. You can ask "Show me a chart of my top 5 campaigns by conversion rate last month" and get a live, interactive dashboard in seconds, saving you the hours you'd otherwise spend wrangling data.