2026-06-11 · 5 min read · Rahul Chitturi
- url
- marketing
Marketing teams paste tracking URLs into emails, QR codes, and mobile deep links. One wrong encode pass and utm_campaign arrives garbled in analytics—or worse, routes users to a 404.
Encode query values, not the whole URL
Only the value after = needs percent-encoding in most cases. Encoding https:// breaks the scheme. Encode spaces as %20 in paths; form bodies may use + historically.
Test the full chain
Generate a QR code, scan it on iOS and Android, and confirm analytics receives exact parameter strings. Mobile browsers sometimes normalize URLs differently than desktop.