Your UTM Parameters and Click Id’s Are Under Attack: Here’s How to Fight Back
Your marketing attribution is about to take a major hit. And most marketers have no idea it’s coming.
The Perfect Storm is Brewing
Privacy tools are getting aggressive. Safari is leading the charge with massive changes coming in September 2025.
According to Safari’s official announcement, they’re stripping click identifiers from URLs in standard browsing mode. That means your precious gclid, fbclid, and msclkid parameters are going bye-bye.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
UTM Stripping is Already Here
Ad blockers don’t just block ads anymore. They’re actively removing your UTM parameters too.
Popular browser extensions like uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are silently deleting your utm_source, utm_campaign, and utm_medium parameters. Your carefully crafted campaign tracking? Gone.
One day you’re seeing clean attribution data. The next day, everything shows up as “direct traffic” in Google Analytics.
The Attribution Apocalypse
Here’s what happens when your tracking gets stripped:
Your Facebook ads suddenly show zero conversions. Your Google campaigns look like they’re not working. Your email marketing appears to have stopped driving traffic entirely.
But people are still buying. They’re just invisible to your analytics.
Your ROAS calculations become meaningless. Budget allocation decisions get made with bad data. Marketing teams start questioning what’s actually working.
The Million Dollar Question
How do you track campaigns when browsers are actively fighting against you?
You need a system that’s privacy-proof. Something that can’t be detected or stripped by ad blockers or browsers.
Enter inPIPE ™ by Seresa
Seresa’s inPIPE WordPress plugin has been solving this exact problem since July 2025. The free version gives you superb URL encoding protection right now for free.
Here’s how it works:
Instead of using obvious UTM parameters, you encode everything into innocent-looking codes. Your campaign link becomes seresa.io/landing?bbx=hyjH7k instead of the obvious seresa.io/landing?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=summer_sale
Privacy tools see a harmless parameter. They leave it alone.
The Premium Transmute Advantage
Our Premium Transmute Engine ™ service takes this to the next level with servr side event tracking.
To get started download our WordPress plugin and upgrade to our premium enterprise-grade encoding solutions to process all your events server-side into your favourite integrations: GA4, FB ads, Big Query etc.
Your encoded parameters survive every privacy tool out there. No more lost attribution data.
Your analytics stay clean and accurate. Campaign performance remains measurable.
Coming Soon: Smart Attribution Preservation
We’re working on something even better. Look-alike fallback click IDs.
When Safari strips your gclid, we’ll inject a replacement that Google Analytics still recognizes. When ad blockers remove your fbclid, we’ll add a Facebook-formatted placeholder.
Here’s what happens:
Original URL from Facebook ad using our coded URL’s : seresa.io/hg8j=Hjys&fbclid=IwAR1x2y3z4b5c6d
( where hg8j=Hjys =utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc and is substituted once visitors land on your WordPress site ).
After Safari strips it: seresa.io/hg8j=Hjys&(fbclid gone!)
Our fallback injection: seresa,io?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&fbclid=fallback_fb_20250920_001
Your GA4 gets all the attribution signals it expects: utm_source=facebook, utm_medium=cpc, AND a properly formatted fbclid (sample is a simple example above).
Google keeps crediting Facebook for the conversion instead of dumping it into “direct” traffic.
But here’s the smart part – the fallback IDs are detectable in your BigQuery data. Search for fallback_fb_ and you can measure exactly how much Facebook traffic is getting stripped.
Your BigQuery analysis:
- Real fbclid conversions: 847
- Fallback fbclid conversions: 213
- Privacy tool impact: 20.1% of Facebook traffic affected
Your attribution stays strong in GA4 while you get crystal-clear visibility into what’s actually happening behind the scenes and allows you to keep an eye on the future and how fast your data is getting degraded so you can act in time to fix issues.
This smart fallback system is coming soon to inPIPE Premium subscribers.
The Bottom Line
The privacy wars are heating up. Traditional tracking methods are becoming unreliable.
You need attribution armor. Something that protects your campaign data from browser interference.
inPIPE gives you that protection. The free version handles basic encoding. Premium delivers enterprise-grade attribution security.
Don’t wait until September 2025 when Safari’s changes go live. Start protecting your attribution data today. Because in the privacy-first future, only the prepared marketers will survive.
Ready to bulletproof your attribution? Check out inPIPE for WordPress and start encoding your campaign URLs today.
