Help Center Troubleshooting Problems with Ad Serving

How do I troubleshoot clickTAG issues for a Flash ad?

Once a Flash ad is setup in our ad server, you can click on it as a test. The click should record and redirect you to the correct landing page. However, these are the common issues that you might experience when setting up click tracking for a Flash ad.

Case Sensitivity

Since ActionScript is case-sensitive, clickTAG is not the same as ClickTAG, clickTag, or ClickTag. For your convenience, our system has a auto-detection system to determine the correct string being used in the SWF file. However, if the SWF file contains multiple clickTAG's with the different casing, our detector will not know which one to use for the click tracking. For example: if the SWF file contains both ClickTag and clickTAG for some reasons, an error message will be displayed in your ad setting page.

Multiple Click Tags

On the ad page, you might see a message that there are multiple variances of click tags. If you have performed a test click and it was properly counted in the report and you were redirected to the correct landing page then this message is for your information. You do not have to make changes to the ad as it was designed to be flexible and accept different versions of clickTAG.

"Undefined" Error

After the conversion to use clickTAG, if you paste the Flash file URL into the browser and click directly on the Flash ad, it might not open any window (nothing happens) or it will link to an error URL (often ends with "undefined"). This is normal because the SWF file is expecting a dynamic URL to be provided from our ad server. Once you enter this SWF file into our ad server with an appropriate landing page URL, clicking on it via the preview or via the serving code will go to the correct destination.

Troubleshooting Tool

We have developed a troubleshooting tool that can assist you in solving issues related to clickTAG. Please sign into your account and you can access it on this page or click on the link "Troubleshoot clickTAG" when viewing the Details tab of your Flash ad.

Test Click

If you do not have access to the Troubleshooting Tool as described above, this is a simple procedure to test a SWF file for clickTAG support:

Upload your SWF file to an online location and get its URL. For example: http://mysite.com/ad.swf
Append the parameter ?clickTAG=http://example.com to the end of the SWF file's URL. For example: http://mysite.com/ad.swf?clickTAG=http://example.com
Paste the full URL to the browser and click on the ad.

If the ad redirects to http://example.com then it is working properly. On the other hand, if it redirects to any error page or does not respond then you would need to check the manual conversion steps again or contact the ad provider/creator for assistance. Please note that variables in Flash ActionScript language is case-sensitive so you might need to check for different variances: "clickTAG", "ClickTAG", "clickTag", "ClickTag", or "clicktag".

False Alarm with mod_security Firewall

If your web server returns "403 Forbidden" when you are trying to test clickTAG, it's likely the web host uses mod_security, or another similar firewall, as a prevention method from malicious activities. However, in this case, it is a false alarm. In order to track clicks for Flash/SWF ads via clickTAG, the landing page URL must be appended to the end of the SWF file. This is an industry standard and is used by all ad servers and ad platforms. If mod_security mistakenly identifies it as a potential danger, it will block the file from loading, which means the ad cannot display.

As a solution, you would need to contact your web hosting service to add an exception for SWF files. Another alternative is to create a folder for these asset files and exclude this folder from mod_security. If you cannot get assistance from your web host, you would need to use another file hosting service, or you can subscribe to our Fast Delivery add-on to upload Flash and image files with one convenient click.

SSL vs. Non-SSL

If the ActionScript code checks for "http://" as the redirection string, it will not support click tracking when the ad is served securely via SSL ad serving. As an example, compare the following two code snippets. The first only supports standard/non-SSL ad serving while the second supports both.

on (release) {
  if (_root.clickTAG.substr(0,7) == "http://") {
    getURL(_root.clickTAG,_root.TargetAS);
  }
}

This code supports click tracking for SWF ads via both non-SSL and SSL ad serving:

on (release) {
  if (_root.clickTAG.substr(0,4) == "http") {
    getURL(_root.clickTAG,_root.TargetAS);
  }
}

URL Encoding

If you pass a long and complex URL into the clickTAG parameter, it should be encoded properly to avoid any potential conflicts with other parameters on the redirection chain. For your convenience, we have an encoding/decoding tool here that can encode and decode an input URL for clickTAG.