You will set up a shared spreadsheet that builds tagged links from dropdown values and logs every link you create.
Farah's rules page from lesson 2.2 helped for about three weeks, until the freelancer who runs her ads built a link from memory in a hurry and typed "Instagram" with a capital I. There was nothing wrong with the rules themselves, but every tag typed by hand is a fresh chance to make a mistake.
A tagging sheet takes the typing away. People pick values from dropdowns, a formula assembles the link, and every link ever made is logged in one place. This exercise builds one in Google Sheets. Excel works the same way if that is what your team uses.
Create a new spreadsheet and name the first tab "Lists". In column A, under the heading "source", type your allowed sources one per cell, and in column B, under "medium", type your allowed mediums. Copy them straight from your rules page, in lowercase and with hyphens where you would otherwise have spaces.
Farah's lists tab has eight sources (newsletter, instagram, facebook, tiktok, whatsapp, bazaar, partner names, meta) and six mediums (email, social, paid-social, cpc, referral, qr). When someone needs a new value, they add it here first, after checking where it lands in GA4's default channel groups as lesson 2.2 described.
Keeping the lists on their own tab means you can extend them without touching the formulas.
Create a second tab called "Links" and give it ten column headings in row 1, from A to J: destination URL, source, medium, campaign, content, final link, date created, placement, created by, and tested.
Now add the dropdowns. Select column B from row 2 down, open Data, then Data validation, and choose a dropdown from a range. Point it at the source list on the Lists tab. Set it to reject anything not on the list, so a typed value is refused rather than just flagged. Do the same for column C with the medium list.
For the campaign column, a dropdown is too rigid, since every campaign has a new name. Instead, put the naming pattern in the header note, for example "yyyy-mm-theme", and let the formula in the next step clean up case and spaces.
In F2, write a formula that builds the link from the other cells. In Google Sheets it looks like this, all on one line:
=A2 & IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("?",A2)),"&","?") & "utm_source=" & B2 & "&utm_medium=" & C2 & "&utm_campaign=" & LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(D2," ","-")) & IF(E2="","","&utm_content=" & LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(E2," ","-")))
Read it piece by piece. It starts with the destination URL and adds a question mark, or an ampersand if the URL already contains a question mark (some shop pages carry their own parameters), before adding each tag in turn. LOWER and SUBSTITUTE force the campaign and content values into lowercase with hyphens, so "Work Trousers" becomes "work-trousers" no matter how it was typed. The last part adds utm_content only when column E has something in it.
Copy the formula down the column. Then test it on a dummy row before anyone relies on it.
Columns G to J turn the sheet into a record. For each link, fill in the date, where it will be used (newsletter header, Instagram bio, bazaar card) and who made it. The last column says whether it passed the realtime check described in lesson 2.3, Tagging mistakes that break your reports, and stays blank until someone has clicked it and seen it arrive.
The log earns its keep months later. When an odd source shows up in GA4, you search the sheet and find who made the link and where it went. When you plan a campaign, you copy last year's row and change the date.
Share the sheet with everyone who creates links, with edit access to the Links tab. If your tool allows it, protect the Lists tab and the formula column so only you can change them.
Farah's next campaign is the December year-end sale. She needs three links.
First, the newsletter button: destination https://www.example.com/sale, source newsletter, medium email, campaign 2026-12-year-end-sale, content button. The sheet produces:
https://www.example.com/sale?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2026-12-year-end-sale&utm_content=button
For the Instagram post, the link goes in her bio, so she picks source instagram and medium social, keeps the same campaign and sets content to bio-link.
The third is a QR code for the cards she will hand out at a December bazaar, with source bazaar, medium qr, the same campaign and content set to card. She pastes the final link into a QR generator, prints one test card and scans it with her phone, and only orders the rest once the visit has shown up in realtime.
Because all three share one campaign name, in January she can filter GA4 by 2026-12-year-end-sale and see each source side by side.
If you only need a single link and do not want to open the sheet, Google's Campaign URL Builder does the same job in a web form: you fill in the fields and copy the result. It does not log anything or stop you typing a new spelling, so use it for one-offs and log the result in your sheet afterwards.
A good test of your finished sheet: a teammate who has never seen your rules page can make a correct link with it, without asking you a single question.
Build a tagging sheet with dropdowns and a link formula, and create tagged links for your next email, one social post and one QR code.
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