The Click Id Disappears Somewhere In The Chain: What To Check
The click id disappears somewhere in the chain: what to check
Ad platforms have a dedicated alert for this, and its entire fix is to have someone find what is wrong on your side. That is the whole instruction, and it skips the only question you actually have: which hop of the chain drops the marker. The path answers that itself, aloud, if you ask it with one request instead of a browser tab. The checks below take about a minute together and they run in any order.
What to consider
Check what switching that option on actually does before switching it on. It does not append the inbound parameters to the ones on your target address; it overwrites them, so a target that carries parameters of its own comes out wiped.
Check the status codes as well as the targets. Some codes retain the method of the request and others may not, so a click that arrives as a form submission can drop data in a way that has nothing to do with the query string.
Run the same request against an address you already know is sound before trusting the result on the questionable one. A sound chain carries the marker through every hop and ends on a plain success, and seeing that once makes a broken chain obvious.
Regard the first bare target as the cause and halt there. A parameter that is gone cannot come back, so every hop after that one is blameless no matter how it looks.
If the marker makes it to the last response and reporting still shows nothing, the chain is not your problem any more. The drop is occurring after the request arrives, and that is a different investigation, with various tools.
Submit a request carrying a marker parameter and read the target line of every hop, not the address the browser finally shows. The hop whose target first comes back bare is the one that lost it.
A browser is the wrong instrument for this particular question. It displays the address you ended on and conceals the route that created it, and it runs the page's own scripts, which can put a parameter back and make a broken chain appear healthy. Anything that speaks plainly and traces the hops for you will do.
The identical test written out, with a clean route next to a broken one: audit a staging site for agents
Read from the top and halt at the first line that lost the marker. One call names the hop, and the fix belongs to whoever controls that hop, which is usually a configuration rather than an incident.