Growth5 min read
How to Remove Tracking Parameters From a Link
Some of these identify a person, not a campaign. igshid names the account that shared, mc_eid names the subscriber — and YouTube's t must never be stripped.
To remove tracking parameters from a URL, delete everything after the
? that the destination does not need — utm_*, fbclid, igshid, si and the rest — while keeping the handful that change what the link does. The reason to bother is not tidiness: several of these identify a person, and they travel with the link when you forward it.FreeMentioned in this article
Social Media URL CleanerStrip the tracking off a link — and see what each parameter was telling somebody.The tracking parameters in a URL that name somebody
Most tracking parameters describe a campaign. A few describe you.
igshid and igsh are Instagram share identifiers, minted when somebody taps Share. Forward that link and it carries the fact that it came from your account.mc_eid is a Mailchimp subscriber identifier. Paste a newsletter link into a group chat with that attached and every click from every reader is recorded against your subscription.si does the same job on YouTube and Spotify shares: it names the session the link was copied from.share_id, sender_device, is_from_webapp are TikTok's share metadata, which describe how and from what the link was produced.None of these are sinister on their own, and all of them are attached without anybody choosing to attach them. The point is simply that "clean the link" is a privacy action before it is a cosmetic one, and it is the reason to do it to links you were sent rather than only to links you are sending.
The ones that are just campaign tags
utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content and utm_id are the Google Analytics convention, and they describe the campaign rather than the reader. Google documents the scheme in its campaign URL reference.Click identifiers —
fbclid, gclid, gbraid, wbraid, msclkid, twclid, ttclid, rdt_cid — are minted per click by an ad platform to tie the visit back to the ad that produced it.Removing either kind does not hide the visit from the destination site. It stops the link naming which campaign, share or subscriber produced it, which is a different and smaller claim than the one privacy tools sometimes make.
One consequence worth stating for marketers: strip your own
utm tags and the visit arrives in your analytics as direct traffic. Clean links you were sent; do not clean the links you are publishing.The four you must never strip
This is where naive cleaners break things.
ton YouTube is the timestamp the video starts at. Remove it and you have sent
somebody to 0:00 of a two-hour stream. On
x.com the same parameter name is a share token, which is exactly why a cleaner has to know which platform it is looking at.listis the playlist a video is being watched in.startandendset the range on an embed.vis the video itself. Anything that removes it has destroyed the link.
The social media URL cleaner keeps those by default, lists them in their own group with the reason, and warns you if you switch the behaviour off. It also names every parameter it removed, so nothing disappears silently.
Clean a link
- Paste the link you were sent.
- Copy the cleaned URL from the first row.
- Read the Removed group if you want to know what was in there — each parameter has
a line saying what it was for.
- Read the Kept group to confirm nothing load-bearing was touched.
It works on any URL, not only a social one. Most of these parameters arrive from ads and email, so a link from a newsletter is the most common thing worth running through it.
Where the parameters come from in the first place
Knowing which button produced a parameter makes it much easier to recognise one you have not seen before.
The share sheet. Every platform's Share button mints something:
igshid on Instagram, si on YouTube and Spotify, share_id and friends on TikTok, s and t on X. If you copied a link out of an app rather than out of the address bar, it has one.An ad click.
fbclid, gclid, msclkid, ttclid and the rest are attached by the ad platform at the moment of the click, so they appear on links you followed rather than links you were handed.An email.
mc_cid, mc_eid and their equivalents in other senders are written into every link in the campaign before it goes out.A marketer, deliberately. The
utm_* set is the only family somebody sat down and typed on purpose, which is why it is the only one that is safe to assume means what it says.The practical shortcut: if you copied the link from an app or from an email, assume it carries something and clean it before you forward it.
What to do next with a clean link
Shorten it, if it is going somewhere character-limited — the social link shortener derives a first-party short form where one exists rather than routing you through a third party.
Expand it first, if it arrived already shortened and you want to see where it goes. The link expander follows the chain hop by hop and names the destination, which is the sensible thing to do before clicking an unfamiliar short link at all.
Tag it deliberately, if you are the one publishing. The UTM builder writes a consistent scheme, which is what makes campaign tags worth having in the first place.
And if the link is going somewhere you want opened in an app rather than a browser, that is a different job with a different answer: social media deep links.
What is igshid on an Instagram link?
A share identifier, generated when somebody taps Share. It identifies the account the link was copied from, so forwarding a link with it attached passes that along.
Is it safe to remove utm parameters?
For the reader, yes — the link still goes exactly where it went. For a marketer, removing your own tags means the visit lands in analytics as direct traffic.
Which parameters should I never remove?
Anything that changes what the link does: YouTube's v, t, list, start and end are the common ones. A cleaner that drops those has broken the link it was asked to fix.
Does removing tracking stop the site knowing I visited?
No. It stops the link naming which campaign, share or subscriber produced the visit. The visit itself is still a visit.
Clean a link and see what each parameter was for with the social media URL cleaner, or follow an unfamiliar one to its destination first with the link expander.
Put it to work
Tools for the job you just read about
Free to run, most of them without an account.
FreeUtilities
Social Media URL Cleaner
Strip the tracking off a link — and see what each parameter was telling somebody.
Clean →1 runs
FreePreviews
Google SERP Snippet Preview
See your title and description as a Google result — on a desktop and a phone.
Preview →5 runs
FreeAnalytics & growth
Instagram Money Calculator
What to charge for a post — priced the way a brand actually prices it.
Calculate →
FreeUtilities
Username Availability Checker
One handle, checked against every network’s rules at once.
Check →
FreeUtilities
YouTube Metadata Viewer
Every field a YouTube video declares about itself, in one table.
View metadata →
FreeAnalytics & growth
YouTube Shadowban Detector
Find out whether a setting is suppressing your video — or whether it just underperformed.
Detect →
Keep reading
More from the blog
Growth5 min read
Social Media Deep Links: Open a Link in the App, Not the Browser
A universal link opens the app when it is installed and the website when it is not. A scheme URI opens the app or does nothing at all — silently.
Search5 min read
How to Embed a Social Media Post on Your Website
Every platform publishes embed code and most hide it. Here is where each one keeps it, when to use an iframe instead of a script, and what to do about consent.
Search4 min read
How to Shorten a YouTube Link
YouTube has its own short domain, youtu.be. Here is how to build one from any link shape, and why copying the timestamp across usually breaks it.