The benefits of server-side tracking

Server-Side Tracking (also known as server-side tagging) can be intimidating and has been a hot topic in measurement spaces in recent years. In this blog we dive into what is it and why should you care about how your on site measurement is deployed.

Client-side vs. Server-side tracking

To start we need to understand Client-Side Tracking. We’ve written a blog on this already but to summarise, client-side tagging works by loading your tracking scripts in a “container”, these scripts are all still loaded on the website but they are done so “asynchronously” (in other words all at the same time). This approach to tag management is a great way to speed up your website, because instead of loading one piece of code at a time you’re doing it all at once. The problem with client-side tracking is that is that even though it’s faster than adding code directly to the site it can still be a burden on site load speeds if there’s a lot of tracking snippets to run. This is because each tracking snippet needs to send data to its respective tracking domain (facebok.com for meta, google-analytics.com for GA4 etc).

Client-Side Tracking, while faster than hardcoding tracking pixels, still impacts page load speeds because potentially lots of code is loaded on site at once.

This is where Server-Side tracking comes in, instead of loading lots of JavaScript libraries onto the website at once what if I told you everything could be handled by a single tag. One bit of code to rule them all, one code to find them, one code to bring them all and in the server bind them! (I’ve been reading the Lord of the Rings a lot recently, so you’ll have to forgive the cheesy quote).

Fundamentally, a server-side tracking solution works by sending data to a dedicated 1^st party server instead of a 3rd party tracking domain. The server then distributes data across 3^rd parties. This means that instead of firing a dozen purchase pixels at once, we instead send one and have the server deal with distributing the data to each vendor away from the user’s browser.

What is the benefit of server-side tracking?

For starters, you should care because a faster site results in happier customers better SEO rankings and more complete data collection, but that’s not the only reason why server-side tracking is useful. 

Better data control

It’s difficult to know what all marketing tags are capable of. Some of them may employ cross site tracking features like fingerprinting to identify your customers without explicit consent. From a privacy standpoint, this is obviously a big issue and something server-side tracking is adept at solving as it allows us to alter the data being sent to each vendor. In a server side GTM container we have ultimate control over what is and isn’t sent to a vendor which means we can limit the data that is send only to what is needed.

Adblocker Resistance
Ad Blockers have many known vendors that they prevent data being sent to, even if you have the user’s consent on your website. They do this by blocking network request that are sent out to 3^rd parties like Meta and Google. With a server-side tracking solution though you don’t send data to Meta or Google, instead you send it to your own first party domain (for Hookflash we send it to data.hookflash.co.uk). These kinds of requests are not easily blocked, because 1^st party requests are essential for a website to function properly.

New tracking solutions
Increasingly, vendors are following the likes of Meta, Google and TikTok by providing server-side solutions. If you’ve heard of Meta’s conversions API (CAPI) for example, you’ll know meta strongly recommend it’s use and for good reason. But these solutions aren’t ones that sit on your website, that’s what pixels are for. Conversions APIs exclusively sit as server-side solutions so you’ll need something like GTM Server-Side if you want to unlock the most out of those tools.

Cookie Resistance

Traditional cookies are technically known as JavaScript cookies because they are editable via JavaScript, this makes them easy to use but also easy to edit and delete by technologies such as Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) or Adblockers. With a server-side tracking solution though you can set server managed cookies that aren’t editable with javascript making them more resistant to these technologies.

Not only this, but your SEO team is likely also going to be singing your praises as a result of faster page load times!

So that’s what server-side tracking is and why you should care, in a follow up blog I’ll outline the process of setting this up using GCP but if you can’t wait for that, or if you just need help deploying this for your business, reach out to one of our experts.