Not only the legislation is limeting the user tracking severly, but also the large players develop their products more and more towards privacy by design. AdBlocking and efforts like Mozilla’s “Enhanced Tracking Protection” and other efforts already lead to a loss of around 40% of website users. Due to this development, we expect a substantial paradigm change in capturing user data.
To this day, ninety percent of user data is still tracked through the browser’s client. This method allows for little control over the data captured, is prone to ad-blocking and might slow down the webiste. Moving the data flow to the server-side is one approach to reduce the load on the website visitors browser, as well as ensuring a much higher data quality, more control over the data and even the option to enrich the data on the go.
Recently Google released a new server-side feature for the Google Tag Manager. In our new meetup-format: Digital Analytics Knowledge, we explain how serverside tracking works, take a closer look at the new version of the Google Tag Manager and draw comparisions between other methods to implement serverside tracking.