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: Server Side Tracking
Exploring Adobe Launch Server Side (aka Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection Event Forwarding)
In digital analytics, there has been a trend lately to move data collection away from the client towards a server side implementation. In most cases, companies try to circumvent technical restrictions like Apple’s “Intelligent” Tracking Protection, make collected data more consistent across analytics tools and marketing platforms, or hide their non-GDPR-compliant setups from their users. This trend also brings some (but not all) elements of tag management to the server side, as Jim Gordon described well. In most scenarios, data and events are collected from the client (like a website or app) using a tag manager. Instead of sending events directly to, for example, Adobe Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, etc., from the browser, they are first sent to a common endpoint that collects, enriches, and forwards data to the desired tools. This common endpoint is usually referred to as a server side tag manager and is implemented in a first-party […]