With the Safari, macOS, and iOS update in September 2025, Apple announced that it will start stripping Click IDs from several well-known advertising platforms:

From our tests, and those of many peers, we’ve seen that Click IDs are only stripped in Safari’s private browsing mode. This currently affects only a small percentage of your user base.

Click IDs, whether from Google (GCLID) or Facebook (FBCLID), are appended to URLs and help platforms tie a click on an ad back to a website (offline) conversion. In other words, they provide insights into whether an ad led to an actual conversion.

Without Click IDs, it becomes much harder to attribute conversions to ad campaigns, leaving you in the dark about campaign performance.

When a Click ID is present in the URL, it sets a cookie with that value. Whenever a user converts on your website, the cookie is read and sent back to advertising platforms, allowing them to tie the conversion back to the ad.

This means Click IDs are fundamental for measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Fortunately, there are several ways to preserve Click IDs or use alternative methods to track conversions without relying solely on them.

Enhanced Conversions for Google Ads, or Advanced Matching for Meta, Pinterest, and Snapchat, allow advertisers to tie conversions back to clicks using first-party data instead of just a Click ID.

When a user submits a form or completes a purchase, first-party data (such as an email address or phone number) is sent to the advertising platform. This data is hashed, so it cannot be recognized by external parties. The platforms then try to match the data against their own databases. When a match is found, the conversion can be attributed.

Google Ads uses both Enhanced Conversions (for website actions) and Enhanced Conversions for Leads (for offline conversion tracking). At Octanist, we utilize Enhanced Conversions for Leads to strengthen our offline conversion imports, allowing us to match on more than just a Click ID.

Although Enhanced Conversions and Advanced Matching can work without a Click ID, results are typically better when both the Click ID and first-party data are available.

If you want to learn more, read: Enhanced Conversions in Google Ads: Web vs. Leads Explained.

Many server-side solutions, such as Stape and Taggrs, offer tags or server-side transformations that replace the Click ID with your own identifier. These solutions mask the original Click ID and substitute it with a custom one. Currently, this only works with the Google Click ID.

To set this up, you need server-side tagging and must add an extra parameter in Google Ads that contains the original Google Click ID value.

It is possible to attempt this without server-side tagging, but it is less robust and you risk trying to recover a Click ID that was already stripped before Google Tag Manager loaded.

Octanist uses server-side solutions that allow you to send qualified and converted leads back to advertising platforms. This approach enables modification of the Click ID value and ensures data is sent without the limitations of web-only tracking.

If you want to set up Click ID recovery, consider reading:

Instead of relying solely on web Click IDs, you can enhance this data with first-party data as described earlier. However, this typically requires Google Tag Manager. But what if Tag Manager wasn’t loaded or was blocked by ad blockers?

In that case, you can still send first-party data along with other identifiers (such as user_id) to Octanist or other platforms for offline conversion imports.

If this data is also present in Google Ads (for example, user_ids for logged-in users), then these identifiers can be used to match conversions instead of a Click ID.

Octanist offers a direct API connection, allowing you to send qualified, won, or lost leads directly to Octanist. Octanist then converts the data into the correct format for advertising platforms. This way, you can qualify and send converted leads directly to advertising and analytics platforms with minimal reliance on web interactions.

Although Click IDs remain important for tracking advertising campaigns, they are under increasing pressure from Apple and other blockers. It is best to have a second unique identifier as a backup, use server-side tagging, and set up enhanced offline conversion imports to avoid relying solely on Click IDs.

Octanist not only measures clicks and leads but also focuses on qualified leads (preferred customers) and converted leads (actual clients). This way, you are tracking true value, not just leads.

Need help or interested? Book a call or contact us at support@octanist.com.