If there is one big hot topic in digital analytics right now (besides the unfortunate sunset of Google Analytics 3 and GDPR news) it quite possibly is the recent trend of what many call server side tracking. Currently, server side tracking is an obligatory agenda item at every analytics conference and virtually every vendor of analytics or tag management systems is working on a way to serve the rising demand. However, while there is a lot of talk around the topic, there is no shared definition in our industry of what server side tracking actually is. Jim Gordon has assembled a nice overview of what people might mean when they talk about any of the underlying concepts. In my personal experience, people usually refer to a form of server side tag management, often using Google’s server side tag manager, that still uses some logic in the client’s browser. Adobe has […]
Tag: Apache
Implementing Adobe Analytics in a First-Party context
One of the things I love most about Adobe Analytics is how flexible it is. That is not only true for its interface, Analysis Workspace, and the numerous integrations, but also for everything that happens on the actual website where it is implemented. Almost every functional detail can be configured and tweaked, including the destination where the data is actually sent to. For years Adobe has offered Analytics customers the Managed Certificate program, where Adobe would allow us to send data to a server that looks like it belongs to our own company (or, more specifically, our company’s domain). But upon closer inspection, those requests are only disguised as first-party and are actually still sent to Adobe’s servers directly instead of our own. And in addition to that, Adobe Launch and the Experience Cloud ID Service will still load their data from different domains that don’t belong to your company […]
Building your own Web Analytics from Log Files – Part 2: Architecture
This is the second part of the six-part-series “Building your own Web Analytics from Log Files”. Architecture Overview To start of this series, let’s remember what we want to achieve: We want to enable a deeper understanding of our website users by enriching and processing the log files we already collect. This article looks at the components we need for this and how to make our life as easy as possible. To achieve our goal, we need to teach our web server to identify our users, store information about the activity in the log files, ship those files to storage and make it actionable with a way of visualizing it. Because I believe in Open Source Software, we will look at our options among that category. Another requirement is to introduce as less components as possible and keep scalability in mind. Choosing our Web Server The first part of our […]