Verifying your install
What installed means, how the live verifier proves it with a real click, and what each timeout diagnostic is telling you.
Installed means one thing here: a real click reached us from your site. Not that the script tag exists in your HTML, not that a checker found it, not that a test event went through. A tag can be present and blocked, present with the wrong id, or present on a domain we refuse, and in every one of those states a page scanner says "installed" while your first real sale goes untracked. A click that arrives proves the whole loop, so a click is what we wait for.
The live verifier
On Getting started, the tracking step listens for a click:
Add the script to your site, before </head> on every page. The step shows the exact tag ready
to copy.
Visit your site in a normal browser tab.
Click your own partner link, or open any page with ?ref= and your handle on the end. Adding
yourself as a partner is the step before this one for exactly this reason.
The verifier polls every two seconds for two minutes and flips green the moment the click lands. That flip is permanent: the checklist, the dashboard's empty states and the verifier all read the same fact, and it never unflips.
Clicks made by the install check, and anything in the sample data, are marked as ours and never count. Only a click from a real page view proves anything, so only one flips the switch.
When nothing arrives
After two minutes the verifier stops guessing and tells you what it can actually see:
Something in this browser blocked our script. The verifier asks for the script from your own browser, the same one you are testing with. If an ad blocker or a privacy shield cancels that request, your own test click never fired, which is the commonest reason a working install looks dead to the person who installed it. Pause the blocker while you test. Or use your phone. Visitors without a blocker are tracked either way, and a tracker domain of your own takes ad blockers out of the picture for everyone.
A click reached us from the wrong address. The script only reports from your registered website and its subdomains; a click from a local preview or an unrelated staging domain is refused before anything is written. The verifier shows the refused origin so you can see the mismatch: test from a page on your real site, or update the website address in program settings if it has changed.
No click reached us at all. Usually the tag is not on the page yet, and the install check on the same card settles it: it fetches your page, looks for the tag with your program id, and spells out the fix next to whatever it finds. It also knows what a tag manager install looks like. The quickstart covers that case.
The support question this answers
"Why wasn't my sale tracked?" almost always means the click before the sale was never recorded. Because installed is defined as a click arriving, a green verifier rules out the whole first half of that investigation: the script loads, reports to us, and clicks from your site are accepted. What remains is attribution and processor territory, which is what Attribution health is for.