Pinterest Ads UTM Tracking: The Macros That Work

Pinterest tags your ads for you, from three separate places

Start here, because the guides ranking for this get it wrong. Pinterest supports UTM parameters and will apply them automatically if you let it. One widely shared post still says Pinterest "does not natively support UTM parameters." That was written in 2023 and it isn't true now.

Three switches do it, and they live in different parts of the interface:

• Ad account level. "Apply URL parameters automatically to all current and future campaigns"
• Campaign level. "Apply URL parameters automatically to all destination URLs in this campaign" (this one skips Performance+)
• Performance+ ad groups. Turn Performance+ on, then tick "Include URL parameters"

All three write the same four values: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and utm_content. No utm_term.

That third switch is how teams end up with half their Pinterest traffic tagged and the other half sitting in direct. Performance+ ad groups don't inherit the campaign checkbox. Miss it and the hole in your reporting is shaped exactly like your best-performing ad group.

The rule that decides which tag wins

Pinterest's docs are clear on precedence, and it runs opposite to what most people assume. Auto-applied parameters "will not override existing manually-added parameters in a product feed or destination URL field."

Manual wins. Always.

Pinterest's own example: if your feed already carries utm_medium=paid and you set the automatic parameter to utm_medium=paid_social, the finished URL keeps paid.

Anyone running shopping campaigns off a feed should stop and check that first. Your feed was probably tagged years ago by whoever built it, those tags are still sitting in there, and they're quietly beating the settings you configured in the ads manager last week.

Single braces. Not double.

Run Pinterest next to LinkedIn or Meta and this is where you'll lose an afternoon.

Pinterest takes one curly brace each side. {campaignid}. LinkedIn takes two, as we covered in the LinkedIn post: {{CAMPAIGN_NAME}}. Reddit uses two as well. Copy a working URL between platforms and the macro won't resolve. It just sits in your reports as literal text.

The verified list for standard ad destination URLs:

{campaignid}    {campaign_name}   {campaignname}
{adgroupid}     {ad_group_name}   {adgroupname}
{creative_id}   {adid}            {device}

Shopping campaigns add product-level values on top, including {product_name}, {product_id}, {product_partition_id} and {promoted_product_group_id}. Collections ads get {organic_url}.

The macro that doesn't exist

Here's the one worth the price of admission.

Pinterest's documentation says it word for word: "Please note that the {keyword} parameter is not supported for tracking links on any ads."

Klar's help center currently hands readers this string for Pinterest:

utm_content={keyword}

That's a live integration guide. It ranks on the query, and it tells people to tag with a parameter Pinterest openly refuses to fill. What lands in analytics is the unresolved literal. Since {keyword} looks perfectly reasonable sitting beside {campaignname}, nobody thinks to check. I'd wager a good number of Pinterest utm_content columns are full of curly braces this morning.

Pinterest doesn't run on keywords the way search does. There's no keyword to pass.

Where the parameters go

The Destination URL field. That separate "Ad tracking URLs" section is for third-party click trackers and parallel click counting, which is a different job entirely.

Worth being precise, because the two get muddled constantly. UTM parameters get read by your analytics after the visitor lands. Third-party tracking URLs fire on the click itself. We pulled that distinction apart if it matters to your setup.

Before you switch any of it on

Decide the values first, then flip the switches. utm_source=pinterest, lowercase, every single time. One medium for paid, and no improvising.

And think about the campaign-name macro before you turn it on, because if it's going to write your Pinterest campaign names straight into your reports then your campaign naming has just become your reporting taxonomy, which is a much better problem to fix beforehand than to discover in a quarterly deck.

Build the URLs with a UTM builder rather than by hand. If you want the naming rules written down, our conventions guide has the template.

Then run one ad, click it yourself, and read the address bar. Two minutes. It's the only test that catches a macro that never resolved.