Missing click ids
The sales are real. They are attached to nothing.
Conversions arriving with no click id, or clicks arriving with no campaign, mean the thread between the ad and the sale is being cut somewhere. There are only four places it can happen.
The id is issued when your tracking link answers the click, and it has to survive every hop after that: onto your landing page, into the link to the offer, through the advertiser’s checkout and back out in the postback. Break any one of them and the sale arrives orphaned.
The most common break is the landing page. A link to the offer that was pasted in without the placeholder, a button that rebuilds the URL in JavaScript, a redirect service that drops query strings. The page works perfectly for the visitor, and quietly loses the thread.
The second most common is the network form. The parameter is spelled differently from what you assumed, or the field is limited in length and the id is truncated.
The third is a platform appending its own id and you storing that instead of yours. That is easy to mistake for working, because a value is present — just not one your postback can match.
How it works
The mechanism, not the marketing.
- 01
Issued at the redirect
One id per click, recorded before the visitor goes anywhere.
- 02
Carried to the lander
In the URL, and readable by the tag so the page view attaches to it.
- 03
Passed to the offer
Through the call-to-action link, where most of the losses happen.
- 04
Returned in the postback
By the network, in whatever parameter it uses, days later if that is when it settles.
What to check tonight
You can do all of this without us.
None of it needs an account anywhere. If it turns out your tracking is fine, you have lost twenty minutes and learned something.
Walk your own funnel with the address bar open
Click your ad, or your tracking link. Read the URL on the lander, click through to the offer, read it again. The hop where the id disappears is your answer, and it takes two minutes.
Search yesterday’s clicks for literal macro text
A column containing something like {zoneid} rather than a number means the network is not filling it, which usually means the macro name is wrong for that network.
Fire a test postback by hand
Take a real click id from today, paste it into your postback URL and call it. If it attaches, the plumbing is fine and the problem is upstream at the network.
Look for conversions with no click
Most trackers record these somewhere. A pile of them starting on a particular date points straight at what changed that day.
How UTMCAP does it
What you would get here.
Orphan clicks are recorded
A click arriving with a platform id but no campaign is kept and counted, not dropped, and it has its own report.
A dozen click-id names accepted
Common spellings work with no configuration, so a network’s own wording is rarely a problem.
Unmatched postbacks are kept
A conversion for an unknown click is recorded and marked rather than thrown away, so you can see the scale of a break.
Placeholders checked for you
The campaign screen warns when a token is empty or arriving as literal text.
External ids have their own field
The platform’s id — gclid, fbclid, ttclid and six more — is stored beside ours rather than overwriting a slot.
The Copilot watches for it
Missing platform click ids and macros arriving literal are two of its fourteen health checks.
Questions
The ones people ask next.
Read next
- Can I recover conversions that already arrived with no id?
- Not attributed to a click, no — the link is what is missing. You can still see how many there were and roughly when they started, which is usually enough to find what changed.
- Why do I have clicks with no campaign?
- Usually a tracking URL missing its campaign, an old link still running after the campaign was deleted, or a platform stripping parameters. We call them orphan clicks and keep them so the money still reconciles.
- Does the id survive if the visitor goes away and comes back?
- Within a short window, yes: the tag stores it in a first-party cookie on your own domain and re-uses it. Days later on another device, no tracker can honestly claim to know.
Point a domain at us and run a click through it.
The free plan takes a hundred thousand clicks a month and no card. If it does not do what you need, you have lost twenty minutes.