UTM Governance Preflight

Overview

Use this skill to catch UTM and campaign-naming drift before campaign links go live or before dirty attribution data reaches GA4, CRM, CDP, warehouse, or BI reports. The goal is to enforce a small canonical taxonomy and produce owner-ready fixes, not to invent a new attribution model.

Use And Do Not Use

Use for:

• Campaign URL spreadsheets, ad-launch checklists, email links, QR-code links, partner links, agency submissions, or historical UTM exports.
• Finding missing required UTMs, source/medium swaps, aliases, mixed case, spaces, sensitive public labels, and campaign-name format violations.
• Turning a naming standard into a repeatable launch gate and cleanup report.
• Producing canonical source/medium/campaign fixes before a launch or reporting freeze.

Do not use for:

• Claiming exact multi-touch attribution or incrementality.
• Changing live ad platform, email, CRM, or analytics settings without explicit authorization.
• Sending private campaign data to third-party services.
• Legal, privacy, or brand approval advice.
• Replacing a full marketing data warehouse governance program when live integrations, approvals, lineage, and audit trails are required.

Required Inputs

Ask only for missing inputs that materially change the decision:

• Campaign link export path or pasted table with url or link; useful optional fields are link_id, owner, and channel.
• UTM policy JSON, naming convention document, or source/medium/campaign rules. If absent, use the bundled reference rules as a starting point and mark policy assumptions.
• Launch deadline or reporting freeze date, if relevant.
• Canonical source and medium lists, especially when agencies or multiple teams create links.
• Terms that must never appear in public UTMs, such as internal strategy, competitor attack labels, employee-pressure wording, or sensitive promo codes.

Workflow

1. Preserve Scope And Evidence

Record:

• Whether the review is pre-launch, historical cleanup, agency approval, or handoff.
• Which systems consume the UTMs: GA4, CRM, CDP, ad platform, warehouse, BI, or spreadsheet.
• Whether the policy is authoritative, inherited, or inferred.
• Whether old values must be mapped for reporting continuity instead of renamed.

Read references/utm-risk-rules.md before classifying source/medium aliases, campaign format drift, and sensitive terms.

2. Run The Local Audit When Files Exist

Use explicit relative or absolute paths:

python3 utm-governance-preflight/scripts/utm_governance_preflight.py \
  --links /absolute/path/campaign_links.csv \
  --policy /absolute/path/policy.json

CSV and JSON inputs are supported. Preferred fields:

links: link_id, owner, channel, url
policy: required_parameters, allowed_sources, source_aliases, allowed_media,
        medium_aliases, campaign_pattern, sensitive_terms

3. Classify Launch Risk

Use one primary decision:

• Block launch: required UTM missing, source/medium swapped, public UTM leaks sensitive/internal wording, or a launch-critical channel cannot be mapped.
• Fix before launch: aliases, mixed case, unsafe spaces, unknown values, or campaign format drift need owner correction but do not prove attribution will be unrecoverable.
• Pass: links meet the policy and no material governance finding appears.

Do not silently normalize values without showing the owner which public link or report bucket changes.

4. Produce The Governance Report

Return:

## UTM Governance Decision
[Block launch / Fix before launch / Pass]

## Summary
[Links reviewed, block findings, review findings, source/medium health]

## Findings
| Severity | Risk | Row | Link | Owner | Evidence | Next step |
|---|---|---:|---|---|---|---|

## Launch Gate
[Owner-specific fixes and policy updates]

Use templates/launch-gate-report.md when the user asks for a reusable artifact.

Examples And Acceptance Checks

Positive example: "Use $utm-governance-preflight on this agency link spreadsheet before next week's paid social launch." The skill should flag missing UTMs, source aliases, source/medium swaps, mixed case, unsafe values, sensitive terms, and campaign format drift.

Positive cleanup example: "Audit these GA4 source/medium rows and tell me what policy changes we need." The skill should distinguish historical mapping from pre-launch link changes and avoid claiming exact attribution recovery.

Negative example: "Tell me which campaign truly caused the revenue." Do not claim causal attribution; ask for experiment/incrementality context and scope this skill to UTM hygiene.

Boundary example: "We have no policy." Use the reference policy as a draft, label it as provisional, and recommend marketing-ops approval before enforcement.

Validation

Smoke-test the bundled fixture:

python3 utm-governance-preflight/scripts/utm_governance_preflight.py \
  --links utm-governance-preflight/scripts/fixtures/campaign_links.csv \
  --policy utm-governance-preflight/scripts/fixtures/policy.json

Expected result: exit code 2 and a Markdown report with UTM Governance Decision, Block launch, missing_required_utm, source_medium_swapped, sensitive_internal_term, and alias_to_canonical_source.