Server-side tracking: Don’t lose data due to adblockers

As one of the biggest retailers in the Swiss market, our client serves more than 500,000 B2C and B2B customers with over 200,000 products. Data are essential to the e-commerce company’s ability to maintain its competitive edge. Yet legacy Web-tracking infrastructure coupled with current data-protection regulations and the prevalent use of adblockers made it increasingly difficult to ensure high-quality, high-volume data. This called for targeted countermeasures.

Together with our client, FELD M determined that a server-side tracking infrastructure was required to address the problem. It would not only enhance data quality and quantity, but also form the basis for further applications like recommendation algorithms. At the same time, the IT staff wanted to ensure that the solution would not lead to longer browser loading times.

Adblocker-resistant server-side tracking

To ensure full tag management system (TMS) flexibility, data are further processed via Javascript and transferred to the TMS Tealium iQ within the browser, and then passed on to the server-to-server infrastructure. Thanks to implementation of the proxy server for Tealium iQ, the Tealium Universal Data Hub (UDH) data collection endpoint and the Tealium EventStream server-to-server tracking infrastructure, we were able to boost data quality and quantity. While the solution bypasses adblockers, users can still opt-out. Based on a reduction of data sent by the browser, our solution cut down Website loading time and enhanced mobile performance. Our solution enables the customer to send the complete data layer to the UDH. In the UDH, we use Adobe Analytics Connectors to map the required data-layer variables according to respective Adobe dimensions and metrics.