The naming cleanup that made the channel report readable again

The naming cleanup that made the channel report readable again

A DTC brand's acquisition report listed Facebook, facebook, FB, and fb-paid as four separate sources. Nobody could say what paid social actually earned. The mess hid the answer.

The UTM governance playbook:
— Export every source/medium combination from the last 90 days
— Group the duplicates caused by casing and naming drift
— Write one canonical convention: lowercase, fixed vocabulary, documented
— Build GA4 channel groups or a regex rule to fold legacy variants together
— Lock new campaigns behind a UTM builder so drift can't return

Folded together, "paid social" jumped from a confusing scatter to a clear $94k in revenue, suddenly the second-best channel instead of four also-rans.

Lesson: fragmented UTMs don't lose data, they lose the ability to see it. One convention turns four weak rows into one strong decision.