Khrystyna Desiatnykova
AuthorMarketers who try to figure out why their CPAs are through the roof, should deeply understand the technical plumbing of ad tagging. If your tags aren't firing or your URLs are stripped of their data, you’re basically flying blind as a marketing specialist.
In our article, we’re going to nerd out on everything from basic advertising tags to the dreaded "broken clicktag" error. We’ll look at how these snippets communicate with servers and how you can use server-side tracking to make them bulletproof in 2026.
At its core, an ad tag (or Creative tag) is a small snippet of code - usually HTML or JavaScript - placed on a publisher’s website. Its job is to tell the browser: "Hey, there should be an ad here. Go find the right one and show it."
Think of ad tags as the placeholders. Instead of hard-coding a specific image into a website, the publisher puts an ad tag there. It allows the advertiser to swap creatives, target different audiences, and track results without ever touching the publisher's site code again. In the world of tag advertising, these snippets are the bridge between the inventory and the demand.
You found the answer to your question “what are ad tags” - let’s see how ad tags work, what their types are, and how to set up them.
The ad tagging works in milliseconds, but there’s a high-speed race of data behind it. Here is the step-by-step technical flow:
Not all ad tags are the same. Depending on your goals and site performance needs, you may use these main types of ad tags:
Generating Ad tags happens within your Ad Server or DSP interface.
1. In Google Ad Manager or your DSP, create an Ad Unit or Placement.
2. Choose the size (e.g., 300x250) and format (e.g., Display, Video).
3. Click the "Generate Tags" button → you’ll get a piece of JavaScript code.
4. Copy and paste this JavaScript code into the or the specific where you want the ad to appear.
5. Deploy advertising tags via GTM and use Stape as a hosting platform for your server-side GTM container to manage your tracking requests.
To ensure your infrastructure handles these requests with maximum reliability, you can set up professional GTM server hosting to manage your server-side container.
Read how we debug advertising tags at Stape using a 3-layered approach.
The first step is verifying if the browser is attempting to send data.
If you use Enhanced Conversions in Google Tag Manager, the Preview Mode is your best friend. It acts as a real-time monitor for your container logic.
The real "extraordinary" power of Stape is seeing what happens after the request leaves the browser.
See our detailed video on how to test, debug, and monitor server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager below.
A click tag is a variable used in HTML5 ad creatives to define the destination URL. Instead of hardcoding the destination URL, it is easier and faster to use a click tag.
Click tags allow the ad server to provide the landing page URL and wrap it in a tracking link. Without a click tag, you might get a click, but you won't know which campaign, ad group, or creative it came from. So, in marketing and ad tagging, the click tags make ROI measurable.
The banner creator defines a variable (e.g., “var clickTag = "https://www.stape.io";”) in the ad's HTML5 file.
When the ad is uploaded to the ad server, the server detects this variable. When the ad is served, the ad server replaces the generic URL with a unique tracking URL.
Then, when a user clicks, they are sent to the ad server first, which records the click, and then they are immediately redirected to the final landing page.
You don't "generate" a click tag in a dashboard - better to say that you write it into your creative.
Here is a simple example for a standard HTML5 banner:
// In the <head> of your HTML:
<script type="text/javascript">
var clickTag = "https://www.yourlandingpage.com";
</script>
// In the <body> on your clickable element:
<div id="ad-banner" onclick="window.open(window.clickTag)">
</div>
By following this structure, you make sure that any ad server (like Google Ads) can find your click tags and swap the URL for a tracking one.
There is nothing more frustrating than seeing "0 clicks" on a high-traffic campaign. If your clicktag is broken, it’s usually because of the following common tech slip-ups.
clickTag and you wrote clicktag, the ad server won't recognize the variable, and the tracking "hook" will never fire.Append “?clickTag=https://stape.io” to your banner's preview URL. If clicking the banner successfully redirects you to Stape, your internal code is perfect, and the issue lies with how the ad server is passing the data.
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