Online tracking used to be a breeze, but now it’s more like navigating a series of data hurdles.

At the same time, data collected from user behaviour is becoming more valuable and is a key component in beating competitors within paid advertising, for example.

The problem with client-side tracking

Traditional tracking online, such as Google Analytics, relies on client-side tracking.

This is where a user’s browser automatically sends browsing data directly to external servers, such as Google Analytics’ server:

The issue with this tracking method is that there are an increasing number of ways users can disable tracking, such as:

 

  • Ad blockers, tag manager blockers & privacy tools – These can spot when tracking scripts or tag manager platforms are about to run and intervene
  • Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) – This limits how long 1st party cookies live on the Safari browser, which stops connecting sessions that span over too long a period
  • Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) – This eliminates tracking from certain domains, from certain cookies, or any third-party cookies
  • Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox – This proposes to allow users to identify themselves, rather than be automatically defined, to bypass privacy regulations, and may have a future impact on tracking

Introducing server-side tracking

Server-side tracking adds a middleman to the equation, an internal server:

This process initially looks to be the same as client-side tracking, just with extra steps, but that isn’t the case.

The key difference here is that data is passed to an internal server, which then forwards data to tracking servers via official tracking scripts. This bypasses ad blockers and other tools that suppress tracking, as the user’s browser doesn’t need to run any tracking scripts that are easily identified and blocked.

Most websites require scripts to function with custom script names. It’s currently possible to pass user data into a script with a unique name that an ad-blocking tool has never heard of, for example, a script named nothingToSeeHere.js. Very few users will disable all scripts on their browser so as not to ruin their experience online, so advanced server-side tracking scripts can take advantage of this and pass user data under the radar.

Magento ecommerce sites, for example, can have over 30 internal scripts to handle all of the complex processes in the background, and these scripts each can have any name. Removing one of the scripts can break the entire website, so ad blockers are cautious to block any script they do not recognise, including our main SS-tracking script.

Other server-side tracking advantages

Another major advantage of server-side tracking is speed. The tracking script to enable Google Analytics, for example, is 175kb, and that download time is no longer required if the tracking script runs on the internal server.

Spam traffic reports can be reduced by using server-side tracking, as the ID of the tracking tools can be hidden from the spam bot. We often see a lot of direct traffic spam on Google Analytics 4 for bigger domains, which can spoil reports.

Cookie lifetimes can be extended with SS-tracking. Some browsers, such as Safari or Firefox, limit first-party tracking cookies to only live for a day or so, then self-expire. If configured, the server can set its own version of the same cookies, which are not automatically deemed as tracking cookies and can live for 30 days, allowing for more accurate user reporting.

By using server-side tracking with Google Tag Manager, you will have two GTM accounts, one for the main website and one to manage the server tags. This might seem like an inconvenience, but the server-side tracking account can be kept fully secure, and users on the main account are far less likely to break a tag’s functionality.

Google Ads and other paid advertising platforms have made a push for advertising GDPR compliance on domains they send ad traffic towards. Here at Hallam, we have seen Google systematically warn accounts of GDPR compliance, with a threat of account suspension unless the domain is compliant within a few weeks. Server-side tracking can remove these warnings whilst the domain is made compliant, as the tracking is done remotely.

One last advantage of server-side tracking is the control of the user data. You can tweak the user data that enters the internal server with logical operations, obfuscated fields, or custom tags, depending on which platform the data is sent to.