The Benefits of Switching to GA4 Server-Side Tracking for Agencies

A digital agency’s success is measured by the success of its clients. No company or business would partner with an agency that cannot boast dozens of successful cases in its portfolio. While advertising on the internet is a visual representation of an agency’s work, there is another important layer beneath it, a strategic one. Without a clear understanding of what content on what media performs best, a digital agency becomes an abyss that empties your pockets, not the one that stares back.

For years, digital agencies used client-side tracking to gather data about potential clients’ actions and understand which campaigns and advertisements work well and deserve investment, and which ones should be shut down as soon as possible. However, just as GA4 came to substitute Universal Analytics in 2020, client-side tracking’s time is also running out as more and more businesses switch to its server-side counterpart.

What is server-side tracking, and why can it be useful?

Server-side tracking is a technology that makes data tracking overall more compliant with today’s realia. It implies that all the data tracked in the client’s browser is sent to a cloud server first, not to GA4 or any other analytical platform. The cloud server usually has the same domain as the website, so it is considered a part of the client’s infrastructure and not a third-party resource. This point is the main reason why it is worth switching to server-side tracking, as it solves many problems the old model faces nowadays.

Ad blockers and their “side effect”

Ordinary people often install ad blockers in their browsers to get rid of irritating sex toys and make-millions-in-one-click advertisements randomly popping up here and there. They do not block ads launched as stories or posts on social media. However, they have one crucial “side effect” that makes marketers’ lives much more complicated: browser add-ons tend to block tracking scripts launched by the website when they try to send gathered data to a third-party platform. This has several significant consequences:

GA4 server-side tracking solves this problem. When tracking tags fire on the client side, the event data is sent to a Google Tag Manager server container hosted on the same-domain server, which then forwards the data to GA4. Thus, the overall quality of the data improves, despite the ad blockers.

Privacy policies and the “compliance issue”

To get a better understanding of how effective online advertising is, digital agencies need to gather data like the time spent on the website, events, and activity. As tracking scripts get it from the client’s browser, they often “hook” the data, which is classified as private:

It is not allowed to share this data with analytical platforms, as it is not needed for such purposes and is generally classified as sensitive. However, when the client’s browser is directly linked with GA4, the information sent there is uncontrolled, and private data is often shared with the analytical platform without any use. Moreover, GDPR, CCPA, and other documents regulating the sharing and application of private and sensitive data clearly state that sending it to third parties is forbidden. Do you smell the problems in the situation we described above?

Server-side tracking allows you to review all the tracked data on the server before sending it to Google Analytics 4. Remove all the sensitive information from the package you are about to send to analytics, and you will be completely safe from a legal point of view. 

The hub concept of a server

When deploying a server for your tracking setup, you can consider it a hub. Have you ever heard of the idea that it is better to think twice before doing something than to rush into something immediately? This is exactly what server-side tracking gives you – as much time as you need to review everything and ensure that the quality of data sent to GA4 is on a high level, and it does not break any privacy policy.

Because of this, it is also wise to use a server if a business operates with several analytical platforms, such as GA4, Facebook Analytics, and TikTok Analytics. Tracking pixels run on the client’s side and immediately send the data gathered to the corresponding system. This may lead to event duplication and unreliable analytics results. On the other hand, when events from all tracking pixels are collected on the server, it is easy to compare their IDs and remove the copies from the data packages prepared to be sent to the corresponding platforms. So, the server is a hub where a lot of preparatory work is done before moving forward.

And what? 

A logical question arises after all those great things about server-side tracking we described above – and what? Optimizing the data for the sake of optimizing data? Incorrect. We have already mentioned at the beginning: the more you know, the better you can adapt. When an agency gets the wrong idea about its performance and whether it has chosen the correct direction to move, it will struggle to reach impressive results that will keep the client and potentially even attract new ones. Such a simple equation: good data = correct strategy = better performance = more clients.

Conclusion

Switching to server-side tracking is a logical step for any digital agency to take if it wants to grow and develop in the modern environment. Technically, it is not very complicated to set up, as it all comes down to renting a cloud server, hosting a server GTM container on it, and using the GA4 API (in case with Google Analytics 4) to send the filtered and enhanced data to the platform. Compared to that, the potential profits the agency gets from implementing a server-side tracking setup are pretty impressive.