Skip to main content
When a visitor clicks one of your ads and lands on your site, your site analytics can only tell you which buy and which creative sent them if the landing page carries campaign tags. Apostra adds four standard UTM tags to the landing page of each creative it sends to a seller for one of your media buys, so Google Analytics and other tools that read UTM tags can show where each visit came from.
Auto-tagged links are in beta and are switched on per organization. Ask your Apostra contact to turn them on for your organization. Until they are on, your click URLs are exactly as you wrote them.

​
The four tags

The tags carry Apostra ids and the seller’s channel name. A creative’s id can include words from the creative’s name, and visitors and anyone who sees the link can read it, so name creatives accordingly. Apostra does not set utm_term, which is yours to use, and does not add a seller’s own click id (OpenAI’s oppref, for example).

​
What you set always wins

Apostra’s tags are the lowest layer. For each key, in this order, the first one that names the key decides it:
  1. A key already written into your landing page URL stays as you wrote it.
  2. A click-URL parameter you set on the creative, the campaign or the advertiser replaces Apostra’s tag with the same key. A null value for a key also keeps Apostra from adding that tag.
  3. Apostra’s own tag, for any of the four keys nothing above names.
So if you set your own utm_source=newsletter, you keep it and still get utm_medium, utm_campaign and utm_content from Apostra. If you set your own utm_campaign, Apostra cannot tie visits back to the buy by that tag.

​
Turn the tags off

  • For one campaign: set autoUtm to false. In V3 it is tracking.autoUtm on save_campaign, returned by get with include: ["tracking"]. In v2 it is auto_utm on PUT /api/v2/buyer/campaigns/{campaignId}/tracking-config. It is true unless you set it. false removes only Apostra’s tags and leaves your own parameters alone.
  • For one tag: set that key to null in the click-URL parameters of the advertiser, campaign or creative (V3 tracking.macroAdditions or macroAdditions on a creative). Setting all four to null turns every tag off.
For how click-URL parameters work in general, including the macros you can use in their values, see Click-URL parameters.

​
When the tags are added

Apostra adds the tags when it sends a creative to a seller for a media buy. That means a new buy, a re-sync, or a change to your click-URL parameters that re-sends a creative.
  • A creative sent with no media buy is not tagged, because the tags need a buy to name. A seller that creates the ad when the buy is placed carries the tags; a seller that already holds the creative from an earlier send does not until the creative is sent again for the buy.
  • A running ad keeps its URL. Some sellers, OpenAI Ads among them, do not change a live ad when a creative is sent again. There is no backfill: a buy that was already live when your organization was switched on stays as it is until a creative for it is sent again.
  • A paired-redirect display tag is not tagged.
  • Changing autoUtm does not re-send creatives a seller already holds. It applies the next time a creative is sent.
If the creative runs through Apostra’s click tracker, the tags go on your landing page inside the tracker’s destination, and the click redirect forwards the destination unchanged. If you turned the click tracker off, the tags go on your landing page URL directly. The click tracker counts clicks and your analytics counts visits, so the two numbers can differ, for example when a visitor clicks and leaves before the page loads. The tags are added when a creative is sent, so the click-URL parameters you read back, and a creative’s clickUrlTemplate, show only what you set. They do not list Apostra’s tags.

​
Which sellers carry the tags

Apostra sends the tagged landing page to every seller, direct integrations and sales agents alike. Whether a seller’s live ad keeps that exact URL is the seller’s behavior, and Apostra has not yet confirmed it seller by seller. To check a live ad, click it and look at the landing page address, or look for the tags in your analytics. OpenAI Ads accepts a landing page of up to 2,048 characters, counting the click tracker and the tags; a longer one is refused with a clear error on the creative.