Fix Multiple Click IDs Issue (Technical Solution)

Your landing page URLs keep growing: ?gclid=...&fbclid=...&msclkid=...&ttclid=.... Every time a user clicks from another platform or shares a link, a new click ID is added.

In GA4, this can inflate sessions, fragment attribution, and make it hard to tell which platform actually drove the visit.

This guide explains why multiple click IDs show up, what “good” behavior looks like, and how to clean URLs without breaking attribution.

Why Multiple Click IDs Cause Problems

Click IDs are platform‑specific:

• Google Ads: gclid, wbraid, gbraid
• Meta (Facebook/Instagram): fbclid
• Microsoft Ads: msclkid
• TikTok: ttclid
• Twitter/X: twclid
• Pinterest: epik
• LinkedIn: li_fat_id

Each platform uses its ID for its own reporting and optimization. GA4 doesn’t inherently care about the IDs themselves—but long, polluted URLs create issues when:

• Users share URLs that already contain a click ID, so the “wrong” source gets credit on subsequent clicks.
• Retargeting chains and link previews add new click IDs on top of old ones.
• You’re trying to debug or normalize attribution in GA4 and can’t tell which platform’s ID is “real.”

The core idea: the first click ID in the user’s actual journey should usually be considered the “true” source; subsequent IDs are noise on that URL.

What Good Looks Like

For a single user journey:

• First click from Google Ads: URL contains gclid only.
• If the user copies that URL and shares it on Facebook, you’d ideally remove gclid before sharing or clicking.
• If the user then later clicks a paid Facebook ad, that URL should have fbclid only.

You want each click’s landing URL to contain at most one platform click ID—the one associated with that platform.

Strategy: Keep the First Click ID, Drop the Rest

To avoid breaking platform reporting:

• Preserve the first click ID found in the URL for a given visit.
• Remove any additional click IDs so they don’t propagate through sharing.
• Do not remove click IDs entirely; you still want each platform to see its own ID on its own clicks.

You can implement this either:

• Client‑side (JavaScript in the browser) – simple to deploy but GA4 may see the original polluted URL before cleanup.
• Server‑side (at CDN, load balancer, or edge) – more robust; prevents GA4 and your app from ever seeing multiple IDs on the same request.

Implementation Outline (Without Full Code Dumps)

Below is the logic you or your dev team can implement in JavaScript, at the edge, or in NGINX/another web server.

Shared pieces:

• Define a list of relevant click IDs:
  gclid, fbclid, msclkid, ttclid, twclid, li_fat_id, epik, wbraid, gbraid.
• Read the query string, find which of these IDs are present.
• Keep the first one you encounter; remove all others.
• Rewrite the URL without reloading the page (client‑side) or redirect to the cleaned URL (server‑side).

Client‑Side Approach (Quick Fix)

Conceptually:

• On page load, parse window.location.search.
• Walk the known click ID list in a consistent order.
• As soon as you see a click ID, mark it as the one to keep.
• Delete any subsequent click ID parameters.
• Use history.replaceState to update the URL in the browser without reloading.

This prevents further sharing of polluted URLs but does not change what GA4 already recorded for that pageview.

Server‑Side / Edge Approach (Recommended)

Conceptually:

• At your CDN/edge (Cloudflare Workers, Fastly, etc.) or web server (NGINX/Apache), intercept incoming requests.
• For each request:
  • Parse the query string.
  • Keep the first click ID; remove the rest.
  • Redirect (301/302) or internally rewrite to the cleaned URL.

This way, GA4 and your application only ever see a clean URL per hit.

How to Validate in GA4

After implementing cleanup:

• Use GA4 Realtime to click a test URL with multiple click IDs, such as:
  https://yoursite.com/landing?gclid=test123&fbclid=test456.
• Confirm that after the redirect (or client‑side cleanup), the URL in the browser contains only the intended click ID.
• In Realtime, verify that source/medium reflect the platform you clicked from (for example, google / cpc or facebook / paidsocial).

Over the next few days:

• Check Traffic acquisition for a reduction in surprising referral/source entries driven by shared URLs.
• Monitor for any drop in platform‑specific conversions (Google Ads, Meta, etc.). If attribution appears to break in a platform’s own UI, revisit the logic to ensure you aren’t removing the only click ID for those direct clicks.

FAQ

Will this hurt platform attribution (Google Ads, Meta, etc.)?
Not if you implement it correctly. Each platform still gets its own click ID on clicks from its ads. You are primarily removing extra IDs that arrive from prior shares or multi‑platform chains.

Which click ID should I consider “first” if the URL already has several?
Pick a consistent order—typically the order they are likely to appear (for example, gclid, fbclid, msclkid, ttclid, etc.). The first one found in that list becomes the one you keep.

Should I log which IDs were removed?
For debugging, yes. Logging or tagging events when you strip additional IDs can help you spot unexpected patterns or problematic traffic sources.

Do I need to change my UTMs too?
Not necessarily. This fix focuses on platform click IDs. If you also have UTM vs click ID conflicts, see your auto‑tagging vs manual UTM guidance and clean that up separately.

Can I do this entirely in Google Tag Manager?
You can implement client‑side URL cleanup via GTM, but remember GA4 may see the original URL for the initial pageview. For the cleanest data, edge or server‑side cleanup is preferable.