What Is The Issue?

When uploading new URLs, or editing existing ones, you may encounter one of the following error messages:

The error can also be shown when a URL is not appended with the expected parameters, as specified in the URL Builder.

What Causes The Issue?

This error message is usually caused by empty tracking parameters in the URL, which can occur for a variety of reasons:

1. The most common reason is due to incomplete URL structures which are missing parameters. For example, if using the parameter 'mkwid' to track ID's and the parameter after it is missing, then this error will occur.
   
   For example: http://www.example.com?mkwid&pcrid={creative}&kw={keyword}
   
   As you can see from the above URL, the "mkwid" is not followed by a resulting parameter (such as mkwid=[uniq_id]) and therefore missing a name value pair. Also, note that this does not only apply to the platform specific parameters, but to any parameter used following the (?) question mark that is not in pairs.
    
2. Another (but similar) reason can be if account, campaign, or group names are included in URLs. This is only the case if the names of the objects contain (&) ampersands, which again will cause name value pair errors.
   
   For example: http://www.example.com?mkwid=[uniq_id]&campaign=business&technology&kw={keyword}
   
   From the example above you can see how even though business&technology is only the name of the campaign, the system will still view this as missing a name value pair.
    
3. Another reason can be if your URL Builder is set to build destination URLs, but you upload a redirect URL (which contains multiple instances of http://).
   
   For example: http://www.example.com?lp=http://www.example2.com
   
   From the above you can see there are two different URLs in this destination URL. URL Builder will therefore not know where to append the required parameters, and hence fail to append them anywhere.

How To Fix The Issue

You can repair the relevant URLs and effectively solve the problem by following these simple steps:

1. Replace the ampersand '&' with a ‘+’
2. Replace the ampersand with the URL-encoded version: ‘%26’
3. Manually append all parameters from the URL Builder in MS Excel (be mindful of adding a '&' OR '?' to the start of the parameters).

For more information on the Tracking Value is Missing from URL, please click here to read our Help article.