UTMs, short for Urchin Tracking Modules are tracking tokens added to the URL by web publishers who have integrated Google Analytics to the website. This UTM code is attached to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. It helps Google Analytics to tell the publisher where searchers came from and from which campaigns. But the problem for the rest of us is that if you want clean URLs, then you might want to remove these UTM code from the URLs.
Now, you can manually remove the UTM from the web address or you can use an extension for this purpose. Let’s take a look at the process to remove UTM get cleaner URLs in Chrome and Firefox.
For Chrome Users
If you’re on Chrome, then head over to the Chrome Web Store and install the Tracking Token Stripper extension. Click on the “Add to Chrome” button to install it. This extension, as the name suggests strips out the UTM from the URL query string. Once installed, open a new tab and then open a link which previously displayed the UTM. You’ll now notice cleaner URL with no UTM.
Note that this extension removes the token from the URL once the destination site has been visited. This means that the publishers still won’t lose any information regarding your inbound visit.
For Firefox Users
If you’re on Firefox then install the Clean Links extension from Firefox add-ons library. Click on the “Add to Firefox” button and in the new resulting window, click on “Install.” Restart your web browser and then the extension should start working without any additional setting.
Apart from cleaning UTMs, this extension also cleans up affiliate links and similar other tracking tokens.
You can also add an icon to the toolbar to temporarily turn on/off this feature. To add the icon to the Toolbar, go to View > Toolbars > Customize and then drag and drop its icon to the toolbar where you want it to appear. You can click on this icon to disable the functionality, which will also change the color of the icon to grey.
Note that the main purpose of this icon is to only strip out the tracking token from the URL, but it won’t prevent the website from tracking you.
