Recovering click IDs: Google, Microsoft, Meta, TikTok & Pinterest

Every click from a paid ad carries a click ID in the landing URL — gclid for Google Ads, msclkid for Microsoft Ads, fbclid for Meta, ttclid for TikTok, epik for Pinterest. Your tags read that ID to credit a conversion back to the right ad, keyword and campaign. Safari and Brave, in their stricter privacy modes, strip all of them before your page — or your tagging server — ever sees them.

Why click IDs get stripped

Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention and Brave's Shields treat click IDs as tracking parameters and remove them from the landing URL in Private Browsing and strict modes — the same category of protection covered in our guide on cookie lifetime on Safari. By the time the request reaches your server container, the click ID is simply gone.

Google & Microsoft: the backup-parameter mechanism

Click ID Restorer, found under each domain's Advanced Tracking tab, works around the stripping instead of fighting it — for gclid and msclkid. In Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, you set a Final URL suffix that appends the click ID under a name of your own choosing instead of the standard one — e.g. backup_gclid={gclid}. Browsers only recognize and strip the standard parameter names, so a custom one passes through untouched.

On every request, Measurebase checks for a missing gclid or msclkid whose backup twin is present, and restores it — both in the request's own query string and inside the dl parameter GA4 embeds the full landing URL into, since that's what the GA4 tag actually reads the click ID from. Your GTM tags see the click ID exactly as if Safari had never touched it.

Setting up Google & Microsoft

1. Open Click ID Restorer under your domain's Advanced Tracking tab and turn it on.
2. Choose a backup parameter name for each platform you use — or keep the suggested backup_gclid / backup_msclkid.
3. In your Google Ads or Microsoft Ads campaign settings, add a Final URL suffix using that same name, e.g. backup_gclid={gclid}.
4. Save. New clicks carrying the backup parameter get their real gclid/msclkid restored automatically — no changes needed on the tag side.

Meta, TikTok & Pinterest: a different mechanism

Neither Meta, TikTok nor Pinterest offer a Final URL suffix you can customize the way Google and Microsoft do — there's no ad-platform setting that gives fbclid, ttclid or epik a backup twin to swap in. So Click ID Restorer recovers these three a different way: turning one on installs a small extra script alongside your loader, which captures the click ID into a first-party _mb_fbclid/_mb_ttclid/_mb_epik cookie the moment it lands on your page. If a later request is missing the parameter, Measurebase restores it from that cookie instead of from a URL backup — same result, different mechanism.

This matters most for Meta: Meta's own documentation ties a missing fbc value directly to lower Event Match Quality scores in Conversions API, even when hashed email/phone fallbacks are present. Recovering fbclid isn't optional plumbing — it measurably affects match quality.

Setting up Meta, TikTok & Pinterest

1. Open Click ID Restorer under your domain's Advanced Tracking tab.
2. In the Meta / TikTok / Pinterest section, turn on whichever platforms you actually run ads on.
3. Save. No ad-platform-side setup needed — just the toggle.

What it doesn't cover

• The Meta/TikTok/Pinterest cookie mechanism needs at least one page load with the raw parameter still intact to set the cookie in the first place — it protects against later stripping, not a click that's already lost by the time it reaches you
• The Google/Microsoft mechanism only restores what was captured as a backup in the first place — clicks from before you added the Final URL suffix, or campaigns you forget to update, have nothing to restore from
• Declined analytics or ad-storage consent still blocks the tags that would use the restored ID — this fixes attribution plumbing, not consent

Pairs well with Cookie Keeper

Click ID Restorer gets the click ID back into the request; Cookie Keeper then keeps the cookies built from it — _gcl_aw, _gcl_dc and others — alive past Safari's 7-day cap instead of expiring days later. See the full list of cookies Cookie Keeper extends for the complete picture.