Why care about server-side measurement?

As we have written, third party cookies are going away. This is going to have a huge impact on advertiser’s ability to target audiences and correctly attribute sales or leads to ad spend.

Moving measurement to the server-side, for the time being, counters this by creating cookies in a “first party context,” meaning they are associated with the domain of your site.

If you’re familiar with the current Google Tag Manager (GTM), then there is a complementary Google product: Server-side Tag Manager. 

It’s our choice for implementing server-side due to the ease with which you can migrate from an existing GTM setup to one including server-side.

It’s not as complicated as it seems

Reading through documentation for Server-side GTM can be daunting, but for an orthodox setup the principles are really simple:

• You run 2 containers:

• Your existing client-side container with the normal GTM implementation that collects all the website’s events.

• 1 new specialized server-side container that has a subdomain address on your website, and acts as a proxy between your client-side GTM container and the analytics destinations such as GA4, Meta, Linkedin etc.

• All the required events and parameters are triggered and fired within the client-side GA4 Google Tag, but a config parameter sends the events to the URL of the server-side container rather than directly to Google’s servers.

• All events are collected by the server GA4 “client” that sends the events to all the tags in the server-side container.

• The events and parameters to be sent to each analytics destination (Meta, Google Ads, GA4 etc) are controlled within each tag.
  

5 reasons to implement server-side measurement now

1. Warning messages are appearing in Google Chrome now.
   Chrome is the #1 desktop browser with 65% market share. If you look through the developer console you’ll see messages warning of third party cross-site cookies being blocked in the future. No date is specified but it’s likely at some point this year.

2. You may not even know how your advertising has been affected so far.
   Different browsers and platforms have implemented privacy measures gradually over the last 5 years. The additive effects over this length of time can be hard to detect. Acting now may give an immediate boost to your online advertising.

3. Hosting a tagging server is simple and inexpensive.
   Implementation through a server-side GTM third party server host such as Stape or TAGGRS is very, very simple. What’s more it’s a lot less expensive than implementing directly through Google Cloud.

4. You can consolidate all your conversion APIs into 1 environment.
   Once you establish your server-side GTM container, each conversions API, whether it be Facebook, Linkedin or even TikTok, is simply a tag in the server-side container. This reduces costs and complexity of management.

5. It’s probably a good time to audit your analytics and measurement setup.
   Analytics setups tend to unravel over time. Moving to server-side GTM is the perfect opportunity to optimize the setup of the client-side GTM container. Chances are there are old tags increasing the load time of the container (and your site) or not capturing all the correct event data.

If you haven’t implemented a server-side solution yet, there’s still time before Chrome blocks third party cookies, but only just. You can contact us for a consultation and a fast implementation.