Macro Checker
Paste a tag as it was actually served and this finds the macros the platform never replaced, the near-misses that look like macros but are not, and the encoding mistakes that silently break click tracking. Nothing about a broken macro produces an error on its own, which is why they survive so long.
Runs in your browser. Paste the served tag, not the template — the point is to find macros the platform failed to replace.
Runs in your browser · nothing sent, stored, or logged
Coverage
Checked against the documented macro list for GAM, DV360, Equativ, Xandr and The Trade DeskThe detection rules come from the same verified macro reference the platform pages render, so the two cannot drift apart. Tokens that look like macros but match nothing documented are reported separately — those are usually typos in real macro names.
The failure nothing reports
An unreplaced macro does not break anything loudly. The creative still renders, the impression still counts, and the click URL is still a syntactically valid string — it simply has %%CLICK_URL_UNESC%% sitting in the middle of it. No system in the chain considers that an error, because no system knows what the string was supposed to contain. The result is a placement that appears to be delivering normally while its clicks go nowhere, and the usual way it gets discovered is someone noticing a click-through rate of exactly zero a fortnight later.
Typos fail identically and hide better
A macro name that is close but wrong behaves exactly like one that was never supported. Write CLICK_URL_UNESCAPED where the platform expects CLICK_URL_UNESC and nothing substitutes it, because there is no such macro — but it reads correctly to a human scanning the tag, which is why it survives review. This checker reports those separately from genuine unreplaced macros, since the fix is different: one means the tag went to the wrong platform, the other means the name is wrong.
Frequently asked questions
- Should I paste the template or the served tag?
- The served tag — what actually reached the page. In the template every macro is supposed to be present; the whole point of this check is finding the ones that survived substitution and travelled through to the publisher as literal text. Take it from the browser's network tab or from a creative preview rather than from the trafficking sheet.
- Why does an unreplaced macro not throw an error anywhere?
- Because nothing in the chain treats it as invalid. The creative renders, the impression counts, and the click URL is a perfectly well-formed string that happens to contain %%CLICK_URL_UNESC%% in the middle of it. The click either 404s or lands somewhere wrong, and the only symptom is a click-through rate that quietly reads zero.
- What does a mixed-platform warning mean?
- That macros from two different platforms appear in one tag. Only the serving platform substitutes its own syntax, so the others pass through untouched. It usually happens when a tag is copied between platforms — an Ad Manager macro pasted into a DV360 creative looks right and never fires.
- Can it tell me whether the substituted values are correct?
- No, and it says so in the results. This reads the text of the tag: it can tell you a macro was not replaced, or that a URL is double-encoded, but it cannot know whether the click URL that was substituted points at the right destination. For that you have to follow the click.