Ad Server Macros by Platform
Click, cachebuster and consent macros for the platforms ad ops actually traffics through, with the exact syntax each one expects. Every macro on these pages was checked against the platform's own documentation — a wrong macro is worse than a missing one, because it traffics cleanly and then fails silently.
Click macro at a glance
| Platform | Style | Click macro |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ad Manager | %%MACRO%% | %%CLICK_URL_UNESC%% |
| Display & Video 360 | ${MACRO} | ${CLICK_URL} |
| Equativ (Smart AdServer) | [macro] or {macro} | [sas_creativeClickUrl] |
| Xandr (Microsoft Invest) | ${MACRO} | ${CLICK_URL} |
| The Trade Desk | %%TTD_MACRO%% | %%TTD_CLK%% |
Note that Google Ad Manager and DV360 do not share a macro syntax despite both being Google. An Ad Manager macro pasted into a DV360 creative passes through untouched and arrives at the publisher as a literal string — a failure that looks like a broken click tracker rather than a typo.
Platforms
How escaping decides which variant you need
Nearly every platform offers the same click macro in unescaped, escaped and double-escaped forms, and the choice is not a matter of preference. Use the unescaped form when the macro sits immediately before the destination URL, so the two simply concatenate. Use the escaped form when the click tracker is being passed as a value inside another URL's query string, where an unescaped ampersand would terminate the parameter early and truncate everything after it. Reach for the double-escaped form only when the receiving system decodes twice — using it otherwise delivers a destination full of literal %25 sequences.
If a link works when pasted into a browser but fails once trafficked, encoding depth is the first thing to check. The URL encoder reports how many decode passes a value takes, which usually finds the problem without testing a single impression.