Quickstart for media buyers

This guide is for teams that buy search, shopping or Performance Max traffic and want every click and conversion in TrackCrown. Google only accepts third-party click trackers that are transparent: the tracker must redirect exactly to the landing page Google passes in url={lpurl}, in one hop. TrackCrown's /c/ links do exactly that.

Before you start#

• A certified tracking domain. Google accepts tracking templates only on domains certified as transparent click trackers. Check the Certification column under Tracking → Tracking domains; the shared brand domain may already be certified. A CNAME subdomain on your own landing-page domain that points at a certified domain needs no certification of its own. See Tracking domains.
• Your landing-page hostnames in the allowlist (step 2).

1. Create the workspace#

Sign up at https://app.trackcrown.com/signup and set Time zone and Currency under Settings → Workspace. Use the time zone of your Google Ads account so report days match.

2. Allow your landing pages#

In Settings → Workspace → Tracking, add every final-URL host to Allowed destination domains, one per line:

shop.example.com
*.example.org

*.example.org allows example.org and every subdomain; a plain example.com allows example.com and www.example.com. A url= outside the allowlist gets a 403 page, never a redirect. Google's parallel-tracking endpoint https://www.google.com/asnc/… is always allowed.

3. Create an offer (and optionally a house partner)#

1. Offers → Offers → New offer. Set the Destination URL to your main landing page (it also adds its host to the allowlist of this offer). Set revenue and payout as you like — for your own traffic payout is usually 0.
2. Optional: Partners → Affiliates → New affiliate, for example "Google Ads – Account A", and approve it on the offer. Clicks through /c/OFFERCODE-PARTNERCODE are then reported per account.

4. Build the tracking template#

1. Open Tracking → Google Ads, tab Tracking template.
2. Step 1 Ad platform & campaign type: choose Google Ads (or Microsoft Advertising) and the Campaign type.
3. Step 2 Tracking domain & link key: pick the certified Tracking domain, the offer and, optionally, the partner.
4. Choose the ValueTrack parameters and any Custom parameters; step 5 Check the ad's final URL tests a real final URL.
5. Copy the tracking template. It looks like this:

https://trackcrown.com/c/OFFERCODE-PARTNERCODE?gclid={gclid}&campaignid={campaignid}&adgroupid={adgroupid}&creative={creative}&keyword={keyword}&force_transparent=true&url={lpurl}

url={lpurl} is always last and force_transparent=true sits right before it. The builder's checks reject undocumented tags such as {gbraid} (iOS click IDs arrive inside the landing URL and are read from there).

5. Add it to Google Ads and test#

1. In Google Ads, paste the template into Tracking template at account, campaign or ad group level (the most specific level wins). Keep auto-tagging on.
2. Use Google's Test button, then TrackCrown's Transparency tester tab with your final URL: it requests the link without following redirects and checks HTTPS, one hop, the exact Location, no Set-Cookie and latency.
3. After the first ad clicks, Reporting → Clicks shows them with link type transparent and click mode parallel or sequential.

Full reference: Google Ads setup and Tracking template builder.

6. Attribute conversions#

With parallel tracking (Google's default) the visitor goes straight to your page; TrackCrown receives the click in the background. Join the conversion to the click in one of these ways:

See Parallel tracking and Landing-page SDK. To send conversions back to Google Ads, use the Offline conversions or API uploads tabs on the Google Ads page.

What the tracker never does on /c/ links#

• It never changes the destination because an offer is paused, capped or off-target; those clicks are only flagged.
• It adds no parameters except its own click-ID parameter (only when you enable it) and never adds UTM or affiliate parameters.
• It never sets a cookie on these redirects.

Details: Transparent links and Transparency.