Server-side tracking: definition, advantages and implementation

To have comprehensive marketing analytics or optimize advertising performance, it's essential to track customer behavior on your website. Historically, client-side tracking has been the go-to solution due to its simplicity of implementation. However, especially since the end of third-party cookies, the advantages of server-side tracking have become clear: better governance, reliability, stability, and enhanced data enrichment.

Although server-side tracking has been available and encouraged since 2020 with the introduction of GTM server-side, it still struggles to gain traction within companies.

👉🏼 This article aims to explain the differences between client-side tracking and server-side tracking, and to highlight the benefits of the latter.

Web tracking is the process of collecting and analyzing user behavior data on the web or mobile applications.

This makes it possible to have exhaustive reports on the activities of Internet users and to feed the algorithms of advertising platforms with behavioural data.

There are two tracking methods: server-side tracking and client-side tracking.

Client-side tracking occurs on the user's browser or device using JavaScript scripts or tracking pixels. Data collection is managed by tags, which are triggered by a Tag Management System (TMS), transmitting information directly from the browser to the marketing destination.

Historically, client-side tracking has been chosen for web data collection due to its ease of implementation and ability to provide real-time results. However, this method has several limitations and drawbacks, particularly in terms of reliability, performance, security, and privacy.

Client-side collected data is becoming increasingly incomplete due to client-side loading errors, adblocker usage, and technological browser limitations (end of third-party cookies, Apple's ITP, Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, etc.). Client-side tracking is also vulnerable to potentially corrupted or malicious third-party scripts.

Conversely, server-side tracking is a data collection approach performed directly on the server. Data is collected and sent to a server, which then redirects it to a specific API or endpoint, such as Google Analytics, Facebook, or other data activation tools (CRM, marketing, analytics, etc.).

In this setup, the server acts as an intermediary between the user and the data destination, capable of performing additional processing on the data before transmission.

💡 Server-side tracking can also be implemented through its TMS, such as Google Tag Manager (GTM), which launched its GTM server-side version in 2020.

Server-side tracking offers a range of benefits compared to traditional client-side tracking. These benefits span various factors, from web performance improvements to GDPR compliance, accurate ad tracking, and increased data volume collected.

👇 For all the reasons described below, we highly recommend deploying server-side tracking to monitor activities on your website:

Server-side tracking is advantageous for counteracting data loss caused by ad blockers, browsers with anti-tracking features, or client-side connection latencies. These elements can alter tracking requests from the browser, underestimating traffic and actual conversions.

By migrating tracking to the server, which acts as a proxy between the user and the final destination, the risks of detection or modification by ad blockers or browsers are reduced.

Server-side tracking allows you to precisely determine which data is collected and, more importantly, when and how it is transmitted to external partners. This enables you to select essential information for your analyses and marketing initiatives while ensuring certain data remains confidential.

Additionally, you can filter personal or sensitive data to ensure privacy protection and GDPR compliance. By collecting user consent before data transfer and respecting their cookie preferences, server-side tracking offers complete data control.

Moreover, by choosing when data is sent to third-party platforms, server-side tracking allows for maintaining first-party data over time, thus recognizing the same user over a more extended period.

With server-side tracking, you can enhance the quality of data sent to external platforms by adding first-party attributes. For instance, you can associate user behavior on your site with personal or demographic data for a more comprehensive view of your customers.

This practice allows for enriching hits sent to ad platforms, thus improving the matching rate between your website users and the advertising platform users. A better matching rate directly translates to more complete and higher-quality audiences, boosting marketing performance.

Server-side tracking ensures constant stability in data processing, eliminating connection issues during peak periods like sales or Black Friday. This method reduces dependency on browser or client device performance, which can vary due to numerous factors.

Since server-side data is processed on servers with infrastructure capable of handling more powerful requests, managing large volumes of data becomes more manageable.

🌟 Server-side tracking benefits not only ads and analytics!

Server-side tracking also contributes to the optimization of your website's performance, particularly by speeding up page loading. By reducing the number of scripts and tags executed on the client-side, server-side tracking lightens the browser's load, promoting faster content display. This enhances the user experience and positively impacts SEO, as search engines favor fast and responsive sites.

Generally, server-side tracking is recommended for two main reasons: improving data analysis and refining advertising strategies.

💡 If you are not yet mature in these areas, we advise consolidating your basics before implementing this type of tracking. Indeed, server-side tracking options are not trivial and may require advanced technical knowledge in data marketing.

Server-side collection provides more detailed information, facilitating in-depth analyses. By limiting data loss compared to client-side tracking and maintaining first-party data over time, retention and attribution dashboards are much more accurate.

Server-side tracking is also a valuable asset for refining your advertising strategy by sending more complete and qualitative data to external platforms, such as Google Ads, Meta Ads, or other advertising networks. With server-side tracking, you can improve the matching rate between various platforms. This helps in better targeting and segmenting your audiences, generating more relevant lookalikes (based on more complete data), optimizing your campaigns according to conversion goals, and retargeting more comprehensively your users.

Overall, implementing server-side tracking significantly reduces ROAS.

While server-side tracking appears to be an adequate solution for collecting and transferring online conversion data, it's possible to go further - particularly for ads and analytics for non-DNVB companies.

In many cases, you don't just track interactions on your website. Event tracking is often spread across multiple point-to-point solutions used to fuel your activity:

All these events are necessary to accurately reconstruct your customers' journey. Considering these events is crucial as they offer a 360° view of your customers, enhancing your ability to assess the real impact of your advertising campaigns on actual sales (analytics) and optimizing advertising platform algorithms (ads).

The reality is that your customers can be influenced by your online ads but complete their purchase offline, and vice versa. Ignoring these offline conversions could lead to a misjudgment of your campaign's effectiveness, impacting your budget management and marketing strategy.

To avoid losing events and double-sending all client touches, it's recommended to collect and the centralize all events (online and offline) in a cloud data warehouse. In any case, we advise against using your CRM as the Single Source of Truth, as data warehouses offer better functionalities for centralizing and managing data collected by companies.

💡 If you need help setting up your data infrastructure, feel free to let us know!

Next, using solutions like Conversions APIs is highly recommended.

These solutions facilitate direct communication between your server and advertising platforms. The advantage over server-side tracking configured on Google Tag Manager (or other tag managers) is that Conversions APIs are specifically designed to integrate offline conversion data by linking it to online interactions. Here again, it is possible to add first-party data to these conversions to enrich them as much as possible, thus improving the matching rate on the ads platforms.

This technique allows you to link each offline conversion to the corresponding advertising campaign, offering more detailed and reliable ROI analyses.

Most advertising platforms, provide Conversions APIs. Feel free to check out our dedicated guides:

💡 If you want a solution that allows you to do both simultaneously, use tools from DinMo! Our solution enables you to send both online and offline conversions directly from your cloud data warehouse in just a few clicks. You can also modify your conversion values afterward.

Server-side tracking presents itself as a robust solution for web and mobile data collection and management, operating from the server, outside the browser or user device. This method offers notable advantages over client-side tracking, providing greater reliability, better performance, enhanced security, and a more privacy-respectful approach.

Recommended for becoming data-driven and maximizing advertising efficiency, server-side tracking allows for richer and higher-quality data transmission to third-party platforms. Additionally, using Conversions APIs to effectively integrate offline data with online measurements can offer an even more precise and realistic view of the customer journey, as well as optimized ROI calculation.

In short, these technical solutions are essential for increased marketing efficiency, and we highly recommend their implementation.

If you want to learn more about server-side tracking solutions or Conversions APIs and their implementation, feel free to contact us. We would be happy to share our best practices on data marketing topics!