What is Server-side Tracking?
The new server-side tracking feature provides a range of possibilities in many different aspects.
Being able to process all data server-side speeds up both tracking and website performance while simultaneously allowing for greater measurement accuracy which is beneficial for websites on both desktop and mobile devices.
Performance benefits
Thanks to moving to the server, the resulting total size of the container and various marketing scripts is reduced to an absolute minimum. This means huge savings in page size and complexity, thus significantly reducing its load and render times. Besides improving UX, loading speed plays a critical role in processing analytics requests, especially on mobile devices.
In many cases, users leave the webpage before all the scripts are fired, resulting in lost data. GTM server-side handles everything, processes data, and sends it to various tools. This vastly improves measurement accuracy.
First-party Context and Ad Blockers
In today’s tracking-prevention world, the advantage of having important cookies in first-party is immense. Server-side tracking is able to be run on your domain, setting required cookies in first-party context, generally giving a hard time to ad & analytics blockers.
Data Security & Management with server-side tracking
With server-side tracking, the company can control how the data is processed and which tools have access. No more random javascript that has unrestricted access to all of dataLayer data, including sensitive or private information, being able to distribute it to dark corners of the internet. Moreover, data sent to a server-side container can be encrypted.
In addition, tracking using a backend server means that nobody knows IDs of your analytics accounts, thus naturally reducing spam.
“Server-side tracking simplifies and speeds up the whole process of web analytics, protects our valuable data and improves overall user experience at the same time.” – Pavel Trejbal, CEO, Optimics
