ROI is the cornerstone of any marketing strategy. First of all, it is a crucial factor that determines the effectiveness and profitability of a marketing campaign. Secondly, it directly influences the business’s spending on advertisement and promotion. Finally, it allows us to compare different approaches and investments to see what gives better results.
Although the idea of ROI is carved in stone and seems to exist as long as humanity does, the approaches to optimize and increase it improve with time.
When gathering information about online visitors and customers becomes more and more difficult due to tightening privacy policies and blockers, server-side tracking appears on the horizon in its shining armor of compliance and data accuracy to save the day.
What is server-side tracking?
Let’s get from the poetic imagery to the harsher and more real things. Server-side tracking is a relatively new data collection method that solves the main problems most marketers face nowadays:
- ad blockers and tracking restrictions;
- short cookie lifetime;
- lack of control over data;
- compliance and privacy issues.
Why does this matter, and why are these problems actually, well… problems? All the issues mentioned above cause marketers and businesses not to get full information about user interactions and activity on the website.
Consequently, the companies operate on wrong data, make not optimal or even completely wrong decisions, lose profits, and their ROI decreases. To some extent, server-side tracking is a cure for the described problem.
Bypassing ad blockers and tracking restrictions
Ad blockers and browser privacy features keep blocking tracking scripts, which has worsened over the years. On one side, their activity aims to preserve the user’s privacy, which is excellent. On the other, scripts that gather information required for analytics also get in the hot water.
Server-side tracking allows you to bypass most such blockers and send the fullest data possible to analytics by applying special algorithms to bypass them or by launching the tracking scripts from the server instead of the user’s device.
Extending cookie lifetime
Cookies are dying faster and faster nowadays, and the reason for this is called privacy. Companies and websites cut the cookie lifetime, which makes both the user’s life and attribution much more inconvenient.
With the help of server-side tracking, it is possible to make the first-party cookies live longer, not to mention that first-party data itself is much more private and secure than its third-party counterpart.
Compliance and better data control
Processing data on the server allows for adding missing parts (e.g., UTM tags) and removing personal information (e.g., e-mails or names) before sending it to the analytical platform.
While many people do not even know that tracking scripts may gather their personal data, their right to privacy is still covered by the privacy regulations, and all legit marketing companies are obliged to follow them.
Getting back to ROI
Let’s say you decide to start Google Ads conversion tracking server-side, what improvements can you expect in the near future?
- Conversion data will reach Google without interference from browser-based blockers and issues. It will provide you with a much bigger and more detailed picture of what ads drive conversions, allowing you to reallocate the budget accordingly and focus only on the most successful ones.
- By capturing users' online behavior patterns and interests, you can more precisely target your ad campaigns and build better user segments. Moreover, tracking users across devices and sessions becomes possible, boosting conversion rates.
- Improved and modernized conversion data allows Google to optimize its automated bidding strategies more effectively, ensuring that the right people will see your ad at the right time. This also leads to higher performance and better conversion rates.
- The curse of all modern marketing - privacy policies, gets removed from you at the moment you switch to server-side tracking. Well, we dive into poetic images again; talking seriously, if the tracked information is modified on the server to comply with all the policies, your life becomes much easier, conversions and ROI - higher, and customers - happier.
If you are feeling interested and engaged - that’s great. However, you may be asking yourself, how to set server-side tracking up? If you have no idea about what to do and how, we have great news for you!
How to implement server-side tracking
Marketers are not developers or IT specialists; they need the analytics results to improve their activity. Thus, it is obvious that they may not be proficient enough in the topic to set up server-side tracking themselves.
That’s why there are services and platforms that take this obligation on them and let the people of GA4 and ROI focus on what they can do best (like Stape).
Do not hesitate to start cooperating with professionals, as this will make everything much easier and more efficient. If the question of money bothers you, believe us: the ROI increase after you switch to a correctly-configured server-side tracking system will exceed all the expenses.
Meanwhile, if you try to set it up on your own and fail, nothing will change in the best case. In the worst, the data you receive will be quite far from reality.
Conclusion
Modern times require modern solutions. Server-side tracking is such a solution. While not so difficult to implement (thanks to people and platforms who specialize in this), it provides noticeable improvements in data collection results, which consequently leads to more precise analytics, better planning and budgeting, and higher ROIs. What else can marketers dream about?
