A hot topic that sounds very clever and promises many possibilities is server-side tracking in Google Tag Manager. The word "server" itself is already promising. Let's find out whether setting up server-side tracking in Google Tag Manager really does add more capabilities.
We explored this topic for one reason only - consent mode. Is server-side tracking a solution for blocking cookie data transfer, which results in significant data loss for Google Analytics and Google Ads? Let's find out if this is true.
Server-side tracking - receiving and processing website analytics data at the cloud server level, transmitting it to destinations while bypassing ad blockers.
With server-side tracking, data is sent from the web container to the Google Tag Manager server container and then distributed to the required channels.
It looks something like this:
The simplest explanation possible, without watching any videos or hundreds of pages of technical documentation.
The server is like an intermediate container between the web and the service for receiving information, on which you can control and manage data transfer.
Benefits of server-side tracking:
👉 Increasing the information content of data is the most important and fundamental advantage of server-side tracking!
Server-side tracking helps to take into account data that is not taken into account due to various specific settings of users' browsers - ad blockers, displaying Java Script, etc. In practice, this is a plus of 10-15%, as we know from the Facebook API Conversions settings.
👉 Additional control over data transfer (when testing data sending, it is possible to check data sending from the server container).
👉 Data conversion (working with modifiers, extending the life of cookies).
Disadvantages of server-side tracking:
👉 Implementation complexity. There's a shortage of software analytics specialists. These aren't just programmers, but programmers who understand the data-accounting algorithms in Google Ads and Analytics.
👉 Financial costs. The cloud server is a paid service. In fact, some of the analytics data will be paid for, which not everyone is prepared for.
Launching server-side tracking - where to start?
If someone tells you that it is easy and simple, it is not! This is not an option to “write analytics code into the site”, but something more complicated. We'll try to explain how to do this in as clear a manner as possible.
- Register a server container in the Tag Manager website account;
- Create a cloud server via Google iCloud or any other service, specifying the API key;
- In the Google Tag Manager web container, in the required tags, place the server processing address, namely the server URL.
Next is a question of your creativity and business processes.
Consent mode and server-side tracking in Google Tag Manager
The main problem with modern web analytics is cookie permission, which significantly impacts the quality of the metrics measured, from conversions to traffic in Google Analytics.
Many marketers, unknowingly, with the advent of server-side tracking, placed high hopes on solving the issue of data quality in connection with the implementation of consent mode. However, this was a mistake, and here's why:
☝ Server-side tracking retrieves data from the Google Tag Manager web container, which, if consent mode is configured, only displays data if the user consents to the distribution of cookies.
Accordingly, if the user does not consent to cookies, no data is sent to the server container. This is why server-side tracking in Google Tag Manager is not a solution to the problem of prohibiting the transfer of cookies to maintain the integrity of statistical data.
You may remember Facebook's CAPI…
One might wonder why Facebook's Conversions API implementation became the solution for iOS 14+, while Google Tag Manager's server-side tracking can't resolve the issue of consent mode and data transfer?
We answer based on our experience and expertise:
☝ In IOS14+ there was no ban on cookies, only on transmitted events.
Accordingly, with user data from cookies, you can use the Facebook Conversions API to send data about events such as purchases with an event ID, which can then be added to the user's data if the user has chosen "not to send event data" or deduplicated on the Facebook server, otherwise. This information is accurate, as we have studied this topic thoroughly.
We hope this information was useful for you. Until next time.
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