Tracking domains and verification
Everything about the tag itself lives on one screen: Tracking, in the Admin menu at the foot of the sidebar. It holds your snippet, the domains the tag is allowed to run on, and what we have actually seen from each of them.
All three belong to a website rather than to the account. An account with two brands has two tag keys and two domain lists, and the picker under WEBSITES chooses which one you are looking at — pasting one website's key onto another website's pages is not a cosmetic error, it sends those visitors' calls into the wrong reports.
Tracking domains
The list of domains your tag key is allowed to run on. Subdomains are included automatically, so
example.com also covers www.example.com and
shop.example.com. A genuinely separate domain needs listing on its own.
An empty list is permissive, not restrictive. With no tracking domains listed the key runs on any website at all — tracking works perfectly, and anyone who finds the key in your page source can use it and consume your number allowance. This is the one setting whose default is the loose one, which is why the screen says so in as many words.
This used to be called Allowed domains and it used to sit on Account settings. Same list, same behaviour, new name and new home.
What we have seen
Under Is it installed? each tracking domain carries one line: either Seen 3 minutes ago · 412 page views in 30 days, or Never seen. That count is real visits from real visitors, and it is the only evidence that ticks Install your tracking tag on the Getting started card.
The two are kept apart on purpose. A domain that has never been seen is a tag that was never installed. A domain last seen four months ago with nothing since is a tag that was removed — which is what a theme change or a redeploy does, silently, and is the single most common way tracking stops without anyone noticing.
Checking it now
Check now fetches the home page of that domain and looks for a Proofbell tag carrying that website's key. It answers in a sentence:
- Found your tag. The tag is in the home page we fetched, with the right key.
- A Proofbell tag is on the page but it is another website's key. The worst of the outcomes and the one that looks like success from the outside: those visitors are allocating numbers from a different website's pool and their calls are landing in a different website's reports.
- Loaded the page but the tag is not in it. Usually a template that was not
saved, or a CDN still serving the old page. It must be in the
<head>of every page, not only the home page. - Could not load the page. A timeout, a DNS failure or a TLS error. This is about reaching the site, not about the tag.
- The domain points at a private address, so we will not fetch it. An internal or staging host. We refuse rather than fetch it — see below.
A check reads your home page only. It cannot tell you whether the tag is on your contact page, your booking flow or your blog — and that is where it usually goes missing, because those are the templates people forget. A passing check is good news about one page.
Three more things it cannot do, said plainly because each of them produces a failed check on a site that is perfectly fine:
- A site behind a login, a password or an IP allow-list answers us the way it answers any stranger, so we see a sign-in page with no tag on it.
- A staging or internal host that resolves to a private address is refused before we fetch it. That refusal is deliberate and is not going to change: a service that will fetch any URL you give it can be pointed at machines inside our own network.
- A site that is not published yet cannot be checked at all. Install the tag, publish, and the page-view line above will answer the question on its own.
A check never ticks anything. The tick on Getting started comes from page views, because a tag on one page that we fetched ourselves is not the same fact as a tag your visitors have actually loaded.
Seen, but not in your list
While your list is empty the key runs anywhere, so we can see which hosts are using it. Any that are not in your list appear under Seen, but not in your list with an Add button — that is usually a staging site or a second domain you meant to add, and occasionally it is somebody else's site using your key, which is the case worth knowing about.
Once your list is not empty the tag refuses to run anywhere else, so nothing new can appear there. That is the point of the list.
How often you can check
Checks are limited to a few per minute per website. It is an outbound request to somebody else's server made on your say-so, and a button that can be held down is a button that can be pointed at a site as a weapon.
If it still is not working
Check it is working walks the whole chain — swapped number, real call, call log entry — and lists the causes in the order they actually happen. A check that passes here and a number that does not swap on your page is usually a number written inside an image, or split across two HTML elements, and that page covers both.