The four parts

Strip away the variations and almost every tracking link is made of the same four components, in the same order: the host that does the redirecting, a path that identifies the link, a readable destination, and the campaign parameters carried along for the ride.

https://tracker.example.com/c/spring-sale?to=https://shop.example.com/offer&utm_source=google

Everything else is decoration. Once you can name those four pieces in any link somebody hands you, evaluating it takes about ten seconds.

The host

The domain doing the redirect is the single most consequential choice in the whole link, and it is the one people think about least. It determines what the visitor sees before they click, what the ad platform sees when it reviews the ad, and what reputation the link inherits.

A redirect on a domain that matches the advertiser is read as infrastructure. A redirect on a generic shortening domain shared by thousands of unrelated advertisers inherits every one of their reputations, including the bad ones. The mechanism is identical; the outcome at review time is not.

The identifier

The path segment after the redirect prefix names the link. There are two schools and both work, for different reasons.

  • Opaque identifiers like /c/a7f3k2 are short, uniform, and reveal nothing about the campaign to a competitor reading your ad. They are also unreadable to you in a log without a lookup.
  • Readable slugs like /c/spring-sale-fr make raw logs legible at a glance and make debugging much faster. The cost is that anyone can read your campaign structure off your ads.

Whichever you pick, keep it stable. An identifier that changes when the campaign is edited breaks every historical comparison you might want to make later.

The destination

This is where tracking links divide into two categories, and the divide matters more than any other design decision.

If the destination is visible in the URL, then the visitor, the ad platform and anyone auditing the campaign can all see where the click leads before it is made. If the destination is hidden behind a lookup that only your server can resolve, none of them can. The second design is functionally identical and is exactly what a cloaking check is built to catch.

A visible destination costs you a longer URL. That is the entire trade-off, and it is worth paying every time.

The parameters

Campaign parameters ride along so that the destination page, and whatever analytics runs on it, can attribute the visit. A tracker should pass them through untouched rather than absorbing them.

Two things break here constantly. The first is encoding: the destination URL contains its own query string, so it must be URL-encoded when it sits inside another URL, or everything after the first ampersand gets read as a parameter of the tracker instead of the destination. The second is loss on redirect: a tracker that forwards to a bare destination and drops the parameters silently destroys your attribution, and the failure is invisible until someone notices the traffic showing as direct.

Reading a link you did not build

Given an unfamiliar tracking URL, four questions settle it quickly. Whose domain is doing the redirecting, and does it match the advertiser? Can you see the final destination without clicking? How many hops are there between the click and the landing page? And do the campaign parameters survive to the end?

A link that answers all four cleanly is infrastructure. A link that hides its destination behind three hops on a domain belonging to nobody in particular is a liability, regardless of how well it counts clicks.