%%TTD_MACRO%%
The Trade Desk Macros
The Trade Desk uses double percent signs like Ad Manager but prefixes every macro with TTD_, so the two are not interchangeable despite looking similar at a glance. The click macros follow the familiar unescaped, escaped, double-escaped progression.
The Trade Desk publishes its full macro list inside the partner portal, which needs a login. Only the click macros are listed here because they are the ones that could be confirmed against public sources. Check the partner portal for cachebuster, device and campaign-ID macros rather than assuming they follow the same pattern.
Click tracking
| Macro | Expands to |
|---|---|
| %%TTD_CLK%% | The click-tracking URL, unescaped. |
| %%TTD_CLK_ESC%% | The click-tracking URL, escaped.Use when the plain macro does not behave as expected. |
| %%TTD_CLK_ESC2%% | The click-tracking URL, double-escaped.Only when the escaped variant still fails. |
The one that catches people out
Work up the escaping ladder rather than starting at the top. Begin with the plain macro; if the click does not register, move to the escaped variant; only use the double-escaped form if the escaped one still fails. Starting with double escaping because a previous tag needed it is how destinations end up arriving with literal %25 sequences in them.
To check how many times a value has been encoded before trafficking it, the URL encoder and decoder reports encoding depth — which is usually faster than testing an impression to find out.
Verified against The Trade Desk partner documentation and creative specifications on 30 July 2026. Platforms change macros without notice — check the source before relying on this for a live campaign.