The key feature of any successful business is its constant development. If you want to be sure that your company, online shop, or whatever else you have keeps growing, you need to implement new technologies, try new strategies, and not hesitate to launch new trends. As you are now on a website dedicated to online marketing, you should not be surprised that we focus on maximizing the marketing channels and achieving your business goals through this. All in all, as the competitiveness of any business nowadays grows by leaps and bounds, if you do not learn how to get the maximum of all your means, you will be left behind. Today, we will focus on using GA4 server-side tracking setup.
Table of contents
- Server-side tracking: refreshing what we know
- Server GTM and why we chose it
- GA4 and server-side tracking: the advantages of such a combination
- Conclusion
Server-side tracking: refreshing what we know
The key to any business's success is a clear understanding of what customers do, want, and need. Tracking this data on the client’s side is a more common but, at the same time, less effective method. A lot of information can be lost in the process because of ad blockers; many browsers nowadays also have various algorithms and tools that block tracking scripts and pixels.
Server-side tracking solves these issues by changing the whole approach. All the data tracking responsibilities are moved to the server’s shoulders. Before sending it to the analytical platforms, the data is enriched to provide you with more reliable tracking results and anonymized to comply with GDPR and CCPA. This helps to avoid legal problems that may arise, for instance, for breaking the privacy policy.
Server GTM and why we chose it
Of all the tools and methods for server-side tracking, our choice is the server-based Google Tag Manager. It has several significant advantages over others.
- Server GTM is a centralized solution to control all the server-side tags and triggers you use in your setup.
- Server GTM has a user-friendly interface aimed at providing convenient access to all the needed tools and menus, unlike custom API integrations, which often require coding skills and profound knowledge and understanding of the matter.
- Server GTM supports many tags and allows integrations with various platforms: TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, etc., providing massive flexibility in configuring your server-side tracking setup.
GA4 and server-side tracking: the advantages of such a combination
How does GA4, in combination with server-side tracking, maximize marketing channel performance? There are several aspects that this combination influences directly.
A clear understanding of the marketing channel's effectiveness
The main obstacle marketers face in correctly evaluating the effectiveness of each particular marketing channel is the inconsistency and reliability of the tracking data they receive. If you combine GA4 with a properly configured server-side tracking setup, the amount of user action not tracked due to ad blockers and browser restrictions will drop significantly. The arrays of data coming to your server will be more reliable and informative, and you will clearly evaluate how effective your marketing channels are.
Improved targeting
Knowing who your clients are is essential for building a customer profile and understanding what category of people to focus your advertising on. Unfortunately, such data is often missed when tracked on the client’s side due to browser ITPs and ad blockers, so GA4 cannot build a realistic profile. Thanks to server-side tracking, GA4 gets more detailed customer information and can provide you with an analysis profound enough to target your campaigns to specific categories of people.
Better compliance and legal safety
When all the tracking is done with a pixel on the client’s side, GA4 gets a whole package of data that may include the customer’s name, address, etc. Sending such information to the analytical and third-party platforms is against privacy policies. If a customer complains that their data was shared with GA4 without their consent, nothing good happens. When you add server-side tracking into this equation, private data is encrypted or removed on the server, which makes tracking safer and compliant.
Conclusion
There is no reason to use GA4 alone, without a server-side tracking setup, if a combination of these two tools greatly empowers it. The tracked data you get will be much more realistic and precise, and your chances of having legal problems because of accidentally transferring someone’s name or the name of their dog (joking) will be much lower. If you do not want to dive into the matter of how to configure and maintain everything yourself, partnering with a company that is a professional in this sphere is a decent solution like Stape.
