Server-side tagging is a powerful tool that can help improve user privacy, optimize performance, and improve data quality. Here are some of the key benefits of using server-side tagging:
Improving Privacy Controls: By controlling marketing data flow, you can ensure better user privacy and security. With server-side tagging, the data flows from the user to your server container, giving you control over HTTP requests before sending them to your marketing partners. You can validate, parse, anonymize, or even block HTTP requests to ensure privacy by acknowledging cookie consent and anonymizing user data.
Optimizing Client-Side Performance: Solid client-side performance is vital for any website that wants to compete for the user’s attention. With server-side tagging, the client needs to do less work. Instead of dispatching multiple almost identical requests to different vendors upon a conversion event, only a single stream of data needs to be sent to the server container. Similarly, the amount of JavaScript libraries that need to be loaded in the client is greatly reduced.
Improving Data Quality: By moving data processing away from the client and into the server, you can leverage mechanisms to improve data quality. For example, moving to first-party context with the data flowing from the user’s browser means that browser cookies can be set with the HttpOnly flag, making them more durable and more secure. Additionally, server-side processes can enrich the data with information that should not be exposed to the browser, including API secrets, business-sensitive data, and user data.
By taking advantage of the custom templates used in the server-side tagging environment, you can normalize the data collected and processed by the server without relying on outdated and potentially dangerous third-party JavaScript.