Click tracker specification

1. Overview

The tracker runs on track.trafficboosters.net. Advertisers put it in the tracking template field of their ad account. For each paid click, the tracker records the click’s metadata and then sends the visitor to the advertiser’s final URL, unchanged.

The tracker only measures. Fraud analysis runs separately, after the redirect has already been served. It never affects where a click goes.

2. Why the tracker exists

Traffic Boosters is a traffic-quality and click-fraud protection service. To tell a genuine visitor from a bot, a data-center proxy or a repeat clicker, we need signals ad networks don’t provide per click. These are the requesting IP address and network, user agent, request timing, and how often the same source clicks.

A click tracker is the standard, policy-compliant way to see those signals when the click happens, including for bots that never execute JavaScript on the landing page. We use the results to:

• report invalid and suspicious clicks to the advertiser;
• suggest or apply exclusions (IP exclusions, placement exclusions) in the advertiser’s own ad account, with their permission;
• provide click-level evidence to support invalid-activity credit requests with the ad network.

3. URL format

Tracking template, set at account, campaign or ad-group level:

https://track.trafficboosters.net/c?cid={campaignid}&agid={adgroupid}&crid={creative}&kw={keyword}&mt={matchtype}&net={network}&dev={device}&gclid={gclid}&url={lpurl}

The destination is always shown in the URL, in the url parameter. It is the last parameter on purpose. When {lpurl} sits in the middle of a template, Google does not escape & inside it. So the tracker reads the destination as everything after url=. The final URL’s own query string, with its UTM tags, stays intact.

4. Redirect behaviour

For a valid request, the tracker returns one 302 Found whose Location is the decoded value of url. It is character for character the final URL Google provided.

GET /c?cid=123&agid=456&gclid=EAIaIQ...&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fshoes%3Fcolor%3Dred HTTP/1.1
Host: track.trafficboosters.net

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: https://www.example.com/shoes?color=red
Cache-Control: no-store
Referrer-Policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade

Google adds the gclid to the final URL itself when auto-tagging is on. The tracker doesn’t add, remove or reorder any parameter.

5. Parallel tracking

The tracker is compatible with Google Ads parallel tracking. With parallel tracking the browser loads the final URL directly, and the tracking URL is requested in the background. The tracker returns exactly the same response in both modes. The visitor never waits for it, and it can’t influence the page they land on.

6. What the tracker never does

• Redirect to any address other than the one in the url parameter.
• Pick the destination from a server-side setting, campaign rule, split test or rotation.
• Return different responses based on user agent, IP address, location, referrer, fraud score or whether the request looks like a crawler or reviewer.
• Add, remove or rewrite query parameters on the destination, including UTM tags and affiliate identifiers.
• Chain additional redirects through third-party domains.
• Serve interstitial pages, content or scripts, or set cookies on the advertiser’s domain.
• Modify, frame, cache or proxy the advertiser’s landing page.

Fraud scores are used only for reporting and for exclusions the advertiser controls. A click scored as invalid is redirected exactly like a click scored as valid.

7. Abuse & open-redirect protection

Each advertiser account has a list of destination domains they have verified. If the url parameter points to a host outside that list, the tracker does not redirect anywhere else. It returns 400 Bad Request and logs the attempt. Only http and https destinations are accepted. This stops the tracker domain from being used to relay phishing or spam links.

8. Performance & reliability

The tracker runs on Cloudflare’s global edge network, close to the visitor. Recording a click is handed off asynchronously. If logging or scoring is degraded, the redirect is still served. Measurement never blocks a visitor from reaching the advertiser’s site.

9. Data collected

For each click we store: timestamp, IP address, user agent, referrer, Accept-Language, the ValueTrack parameters listed above, and the destination URL. We do not collect names, email addresses, form contents or payment information, and we do not track visitors across websites. Data is used only to measure traffic quality for the advertiser whose ad was clicked. It is never sold. See the privacy policy for retention periods.

10. Contact

Questions about the tracker, policy reviews or abuse reports: contact@trafficboosters.net.