Server-side tracking is an approach to data collection that has been gaining popularity in recent years for a variety of reasons. There are many benefits to moving to server-side tracking, but there are also trade-offs that come with the move. In this blog post, we provide an overview of server-side tracking, lay out the key benefits and the trade-offs to consider, and make some predictions about the future of digital data collection.
Server-side tracking (SST) is an approach to tracking user behavior on a website or application, where data is collected and processed on the server side before being routed to an endpoint — as opposed to being directly sent to an endpoint from the client side. For example, with SST, data is first collected by a server you control before being sent to analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.
Client-side tracking, by contrast, involves the use of scripts or tags that run on the client-side — typically within the user’s browser. These scripts and tags can be embedded directly within a webpage, or run via a tag management system such as Google Tag Manager. Either way, as these scripts and tags collect data, they send it directly from the client to the respective endpoint.
As such, the primary difference between these two approaches is the location where data is collected before being sent to an analytics platform. This might not seem like an important difference, but in reality, the choice of collecting data server-side or client-side leads to a variety of implications that organizations should carefully consider.
SST opens up a variety of benefits relative to client-side tracking. We’ll briefly touch on some of the most common benefits in this post.
In summary, server-side tracking can give you better control over your data, can drive improvements in data accuracy and completeness, and can even directly contribute to an improved user experience. Given all of these benefits, why doesn’t everyone leverage SST as the standard? Let’s explore some of the trade-offs that come with SST.
There are reasons why client-side tracking has been the standard for years, and continues to be by far the most common approach today. Here are a few points to consider as you weigh the relative benefits of server-side and client-side tracking.
By now, you’ve seen that while SST opens up a variety of important benefits, it also leads to some trade-offs that organizations may not want to make — especially not without careful consideration. In general, though, we expect SST to become more popular over time. As the regulatory environment surrounding data and analytics continues to become more stringent, governance and compliance capabilities will become more important than ever — and this will shift the cost/benefit analysis increasingly in favor of SST. If you want to learn more about SST, look out for a series of more detailed posts that we’ll be publishing soon to more fully explore the benefits, the costs, and options organizations have when considering SST.
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