Understanding how server-side tracking works

As the importance of building and maintaining an active web presence continues to spread to new industries, companies and individuals all over the world have begun paying closer attention to the traffic they receive online. For those with a dedicated website, the need for comprehensive visitor tracking can’t be understated.

Website traffic on its own can offer a compelling performance metric for leaders and stakeholders to base both sales and marketing decisions on. However, capturing key traffic figures in real time can be a tall order. For quite some time, web marketers have turned to solutions such as Google Analytics en masse to keep an eye on their websites’ performance. These types of analytics tools have proven to be reasonably easy to set up and accurate enough to convey important trends to savvy marketing leads looking for competitive opportunities. Unfortunately, given the current climate of increasing concern regarding users’ data privacy, the primary means of setting up such solutions—capturing data through the web browser— has lost its luster.

Client-side tracking has been targeted by regulators in the EU and abroad who have mandated special guidelines must be followed to continue tracking web surfers without invading their privacy. At the very least, disclaimers are now in order whenever you resort to collecting user information via pixels, cookies, etc.

Server-side tracking helps to alleviate the implementation costs associated with client-side tracking and has been around for quite some time too. Of course, server-side tracking can also offer a ton of additional benefits worth taking into account. Once you know how it works, you may find you’re already set to make the switch.

What is server-side tracking?

Server-side tracking is just what it sounds like: tracking events, such as website visitors from the server and (in some cases) broadcasting that information to other servers for further use. What makes this approach so attractive to businesses looking to get a head start at respecting users’ privacy is that it doesn’t touch sensitive, private data on the client side of client-to-server interactions.

When visitors’ browsers request information from a website that uses server-side tracking, no cookies, tracking pixels, or other invasive techniques need to be employed. The server simply tracks details surrounding the requests that are made on its end, logging these for future reference. In fact, this process is almost ubiquitous across web servers around the world as it is generally default functionality for debugging purposes. The information captured is essentially anonymous, though some regulations (such as GDPR) make it necessary for webmasters to anonymize the IP addresses registered for each request to remain fully compliant.

How does server-side analytics tracking work?

Server-side analytics work similarly to client-side analytics as far as visitor and event monitoring processes go. HTTP transactional details between visitors’ machines and your server are logged in real time, allowing you to share this data with third-party partners to improve audience analytics, advertising strategies, and more.

Interestingly enough, as ad blockers and restrictive regulations have grown in favor recently, the visitor data you retain through server-side tracking is likely to be far more accurate than its client-side counterpart. Ad blockers and browser-based intelligent tracking prevention have been found to block up to 60% of all client-side tracking attempts. Server-side tracking alternatives are entirely unaffected by these innovations. They also do not incur the typical performance cost that client-side code execution does. This translates to faster page loads and fewer visitors lost to poor on-page experiences.

Google’s Tag Manager implementation for Google Analytics server-side tracking adds another step to the server-side analytics process in the form of a dedicated server you must run to process captured event data before it’s transmitted to third parties. This can boost overall backend system complexity considerably, but it still carries many of the benefits of simpler server-side tracking alternatives.

Webmasters can use server-side analytics tracking tools to keep an eye on all kinds of critical audience-related details, including:

• The number of visitors that show up on your website
• What time of day visitors view your website
• What pages of your website are being accessed
• The approximate geographical location of each of your website’s visitors (discerned by their IP address)
• The domains that are referring visitors to your site
• HTTP response codes visitors are receiving after each request
• Visitors’ operating systems and browsers of choice
• The amount of data being transferred to and from visitors’ machines

Go future-proof with server-side tracking

Although client- and server-side tracking once both had a place in the arsenal of any web marketing pro, times are quickly changing and server-side tracking is likely to be a more future-proof approach than client-side options. Besides being superior for compliance reasons, server-side tracking makes it much easier to integrate visitor data into your choice of third-party services and products.

Best of all, by using tools like Lytics Cloud Connect, you can get data from specific segments within your general audience properly delivered to a whole host of popular business tools including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, email platforms, and more. Cloud Connect offers secure data segmentation with none of the duplication overhead you might otherwise get. Give Lytics a try today to learn how it can help your business harness the power of its data.