← All articles
•6 min read

What Is ttclid? TikTok Click ID Tracking Explained

ttclid is TikTok's click identifier. Learn where it comes from, how to capture it through your affiliate links, and how to send it back with TikTok Events API conversions.

ttclid is the unique click identifier TikTok appends to your ad's destination URL when someone taps your ad. It looks like a long encoded string and is TikTok's equivalent of Google's gclid or Meta's fbclid. Without it, TikTok cannot match a server-side conversion back to the click that caused it.

Where ttclid comes from

When a user clicks your TikTok ad, TikTok redirects them to your landing page with the parameter appended: https://yoursite.com/lp?ttclid=…. Your job is to capture it before it disappears — internal redirects and link shorteners that drop query strings are the most common way it gets lost.

Why affiliates must preserve it

The sale happens on the advertiser's site, not yours. The only way TikTok learns about it is a server-to-server event via the Events API — and that event is matched to the click by ttclid (plus your Pixel Code). Lose the ttclid and your Events API conversions become unmatched noise that TikTok's algorithm can't optimize against.

The round-trip

  1. TikTok click → your landing page with ?ttclid=….
  2. You store ttclid (cookie, session, or a tracking link) and pass it into your affiliate link as a SubID, e.g. &sub1=TTCLID.
  3. The affiliate network records the click with that SubID.
  4. On conversion, the network fires your postback with sub1 echoed back.
  5. Your tracker sends an Events API event containing that ttclid to TikTok.

AffPixel automates steps 2–5: short links capture the click ID, and received postbacks are dispatched to TikTok Events API with the ttclid attached.

Common problems

  • ttclid missing in Events Manager — your landing page redirected without preserving the query string.
  • Events counted as "unmatched" — the ttclid was truncated or URL-decoded incorrectly on the way through your affiliate link.
  • Duplicates — sending both a browser Pixel event and a server event for the same conversion without an event_id for deduplication.

Set it up

Full walkthrough: How to Connect TikTok Events API to AffPixel. For the click-ID concept across all platforms, see SubID Tracking Explained.