The answer to this question depends on the type of traffic:
- PPC traffic
- Adwords – without UTM parameters, GA Connector won’t track campaign, keyword and content (but other parameters will still work). You don’t need to add UTMs manually for each ad though, there is a much easier way.
- Other PPC traffic like Bing and Facebook – for them, you do need to add UTM parameters.
- Referral traffic (e.g. blogs) – you don’t need to add UTM parameters there unless your website is HTTP, not HTTPS. If your website is using an HTTP protocol, most browsers will encrypt the referrer information from HTTPS sites (and neither GA Connector nor Google Analytics can determine the source of such visitors). In that case, you would need to add implement UTM tags.
- Traffic from mobile apps (e.g. Facebook) – in this case, you do need to implement UTM tags, because most of them don’t provide any referral information to the browser.
- Organic search traffic – GA Connector tracks it automatically (except for keywords, which are encrypted by Google and cannot be accessed).