I recently have been combining all of my ad networks on my flash games website into Google’s DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers). After letting DFP run for a few days, I noticed that impressions were being counted on my creatives, but clicks weren’t being counted for most of my ad networks’ creatives.
In order to track clicks on your third-party creatives in DFP, you need to insert click macros into each respective third-party tag. A click macro is a snippet of code which has to be appropriately placed into the ad code. However, this is not a systematic process and the click macro location varies per ad network that you are working with.
When you paste your ad code into a newly created creative in DFP, DFP will try to recognize the ad network of the ad code and will insert the click macros automatically if it is recognized. If the ad network isn’t recognized, you will have to manually place the click macro.
Where To Place The Click Macro
The best way to figure out where to place the click macros is to contact each of your ad networks, and ask them if they support the click macro functionality for DFP, and to show you an example of how to edit your ad code so that clicks will begin to be tracked on your creatives in DFP.
I’ve found that with the ad networks that I run, 80% of them support the click macros and have instructed me on how to place the macros in my ad code tags. Currently, this process is very tedious, messy and unreliable. However, I expect it to drastically improve as more and more ad networks will implement the click macro functionality, submit their ad code structures to DFP and DFP will automatically recgonize more and more ad networks to insert the click macros automatically.