With the differentiation of ad servers and newly re-launched ad servers, like Atlas, many digital advertisers will be looking to double track. Historically, most traditional digital campaigns would utilize a single ad server to house all campaigns and be the final source of truth. This model has since changed with many ad servers offering specific metrics that others cannot provide. When these situations arise, more and more advertisers are opting to execute the process of double tracking to get the best of both worlds. The advertiser would keep tracking in their primary ad server, but additionally tack on trackers for the supplemental ad server. This can be a daunting task and requires heavy QA to ensure there will be no discrepancies between the two ad servers. Today, I want to provide a quick overview on executing a double tagging scenario when marrying an Atlas and DCM click tag.
In this scenario, we will be using the DCM click tag as the final redirect and the Atlas click tag for tracking only. In both ad servers, we will create a standard tracking tag. The tricky piece here is that Atlas tracking tags will by default always redirect and trump whatever is daisy chained with it. So to have the Atlas click tag fire and then have the DCM click tag redirect, we will need to utilize the Atlas query parameter “?h=” in our daisy chain.
Below is a quick tag experiment that shows this query parameter in action:
This Atlas tag redirects to atlassolutions.com:
https://ad.atdmt.com/c/go;p=11317220462436;ev.a=1;idfa=;idfa_lat=;aaid=;aaid_lat=;cache=
This redirects to The New York Times now with the “?h=” parameter overriding the Atlas tag redirect:
https://ad.atdmt.com/c/go;p=11317220462436;ev.a=1;idfa=;idfa_lat=;aaid=;aaid_lat=;cache=?h=http://www.nytimes.com/
Happy double tracking!