Advantages of Server-side tag management — Magic Pixel

Third-party cookies are dead.

Over the years, third-party cookies have invaded user privacy by capturing a variety of end-user information to create a persona that advertisers use to provide targeted ads and websites to personalize content. Over the last few years, users have grown more conscious about their privacy and have embraced ad-blocking & third-party cookie-blocking tools to protect themselves. Apple’s Safari browser offers ITP, which has baked-in capabilities to block third-party cookies. Mozilla Firefox has followed suit with ETP for tracking protection.

New-generation browsers, such as Brave, have Tracking and Adblocking capabilities as their core USP. Adblockers hamper third-party data collection for analytics. Depending on the country, analytics reports have missing data between 10% and 30% because of AdBlocker usage. The only way forward is to improve their own first-party data capture and better control how to protect their customers’ PII.

Ad Blockers do not block first-party data collection, so analytics reports will capture a complete user journey while honoring your visitor’s privacy preferences.

2. Website performance/page load time

Using third-party SDKs and trackers degraded the end-user experience. Users had to wait for the SDKs to be loaded onto their browser for pixels and tags to be fired before they could experience the website. According to various performance measurements done by Google and CDN providers, people abandoned websites that took longer than 3 seconds to load.

According to Google, every 0.1s delay after 3s results in a 7% conversion drop. The marketing efforts spent (organic and paid) to draw users to the website were ineffective when users churned without experiencing the product/service offered. With server-side tag management, third-party SDKs are no longer loaded on the end user’s browser but are managed on the server instead.

Sites load faster, thus dramatically improving the end-user experience, conversion opportunities, and better ROI on marketing spend.

3. Compliance with various Privacy regulations — CCPA, GDPR

Governments worldwide have accelerated efforts to make laws to help protect citizens' privacy. The laws vary from country to country, and compliance becomes challenging when client-side Tag Management systems are used. With client-side tag management systems, websites do not have control over the information captured by third-party trackers.

In such a scenario, compliance enforcement becomes a challenge, resulting in liabilities in case of a privacy breach. With server-side Tag management, companies now have better control over the data captured and can restrict what data is eventually sent to third-party sites. Various PII-preserving initiatives can be implemented to ensure only the requisite data required to complete the loop is passed to third parties.

The next big thing is how you build controls and audit capabilities around Privacy compliance and implementation without heavy lifting by digital marketers, who would rather have their time focusing on KPIs.

4. Eliminates Tag piggybacking

Traditional TMS have capabilities wherein one tag invokes another tag (usually called a container tag), called tag piggybacking. With tag piggybacking, a third-party tag can invoke tags from other servers, which in turn can collect user data that the website owner might not have authorized in the first place. Container tags are usually used for marketing / ad-serving purposes. Data leakage is real, and brands may suffer in a breach. Apart from data leakage, tag piggybacking also slows down website loading.

Monitoring and management of multi-level container tags is a huge challenge. With server-side TMS, tag piggybacking is ruled out and PII protection of users is easily achieved.

Third-party API keys and tokens are no longer available for hackers to debug and misuse. All your analytics and advertisement tracking IDs are not exposed to end-users, thus improving security and reducing Spam.

MagicPixel offers production-ready server-side media tag management.

What is server-side tagging?

Server-side tagging is a method of tracking user activity and collecting data on your website or app, but with a key difference from the traditional way. Instead of placing code snippets (tags) directly on your web pages (client-side), server-side tagging executes these tags on your server before sending any data to third-party platforms.

This is a more preferred and secure way of firing tags and tracking data. With this, the data runs through your server before you send it to an external receiver like Google Analytics 4, Facebook CAPI, or TikTok.

Originally published at https://magicpixel.io on September 2, 2020.