Tracking domains

A tracking domain is the hostname your tracking URLs run through. Clicks land on it, redirects come from it, and the tag is served from it.

Using your own is worth it for two reasons. It survives a shared domain being blocked somewhere you cannot control, and cookies set on your own domain outlive the ones a browser treats as third-party.

The one thing to understand: this is a DNS record somebody has to create somewhere else. Everything difficult about it happens in a control panel that is not this one, and it fails silently when done wrong. So the setup line is on the domains screen itself, and the status column is a real check rather than a decoration.

#The record

A subdomain — track, go, click, whatever suits — takes a CNAME pointing at the target the domains page names. Ownership is proved from that record and the certificate is issued automatically, so there is nothing else to add and nothing to renew.

A domain root cannot hold a CNAME — that is a rule of DNS, not a limitation here. For your-domain.com itself, point an A record at the address the page names instead. That path works and always will; it is slower, because those clicks are answered in one region rather than at whichever is nearest to the visitor.

Which of the two the page shows you depends on how this install is set up. Use what it says rather than what this page says — it names the actual target, and a page showing the wrong one could not make a check pass anyway.

#The switch that catches people

If your DNS is already on Cloudflare, set the record to DNS only — the grey cloud.

Proxied, Cloudflare answers the name from your own zone, the CNAME never becomes visible from outside, and verification waits forever for a record it cannot see. Nothing is broken and nothing says so; the status simply never leaves pending.

Anyone not on Cloudflare has no such switch and needs to do nothing.

#Waiting

Verification can sit on pending for a few minutes while DNS spreads. It is waiting for your record, not failing.

The list shows DNS and HTTPS as separate states, and in that order: the name has to resolve here before a certificate can be issued for it. HTTPS pending with DNS green is the normal middle of a working setup.

Last check says when that was last true, which is the difference between "it never worked" and "it stopped".

#Connecting a DNS provider

Under Tools → Integrations you can connect the account that holds your DNS, and have UTMCAP create the record itself.

That exists for exactly the reason above: this is the one step of adding a domain that people reliably get wrong, because it happens in somebody else's control panel and fails quietly. Doing it through a connected account removes the typo and the grey-cloud switch in one move.

#Removing one

The list shows how many Campaigns run through each domain. Removing a domain those campaigns still use breaks every live tracking URL pointing at it — ads keep spending, clicks stop arriving.

Move the campaigns first, then remove the domain.