Imagine a modern smart home nestled among the tall redwoods of the Pacific Northwest. This house anticipates and responds to your needs, often before you articulate them, thanks to a central AI that interprets data from sensors scattered throughout the house.

These sensors mirror the function of event data in marketing. Each sensor, or data point, tracks a specific aspect of the system. Without these sensors, your smart home would operate on incomplete data, leading to less informed recommendations, such as inaccurate temperature and humidity adjustments.

In marketing, event data acts as these crucial sensors, capturing essential information to ensure the effectiveness of your strategy. This data-driven approach not only enhances the customer experience but also ensures that your marketing efforts are efficient and scalable. Similarly, just as a single malfunctioning sensor can disrupt home automation, broken sensors in the marketing world can lead to data leaks, data breaches, and systemic misalignments. 

To extend the analogy further, having the right sensors in place not only ensures smooth operation but also can make your marketing strategy as noteworthy as a house featured in upscale design magazines.

In this post, we will explore the impact of event data on Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and how server-side tag managers act as the indispensable sensors that keep your marketing ‘house’ in perfect order.

Understanding Event Data

What is event data? Event data is a type of data collected from both offline and online interactions, used to understand consumer behavior.

By definition, event data is diverse. Theoretically, any interaction between your brand and your customer can be considered an event. While one might imagine systems sensitive enough to capture every interaction, in reality, events must be configured properly to collect data. Customer interactions can vary widely, ranging from clicking on an ad to making an in-store purchase or attending an event.

Therefore, your marketing house needs to be equipped with various sensors that collect and relay data back to the central hub.

The answer is to use sensors purpose-built for a specific job–so in marketing that could be web analytics, digital advertising, and point-of-sale systems. However, the other challenge is having all that data distributed in a unified format that can be read by the central system (eg, your CDP).

As demonstrated, CDPs are powerful tools for ingesting data from multiple sources and work extremely well with server-side tag managers (SSTMs). If your CDP is the AI system running your smart home, then SSTMs are the strategically placed data sensors throughout your house. Together, they create an event data matrix that captures essential information, unlocking capabilities such as real-time personalization and anonymous addressability. For instance, being able to contract known and unknown audiences for segmentation, activation, and advertising audiences.

Challenges in Event Data Collection in CDPs

Marketing data originates from a wide array of sources, each with its unique format and timing. If you were to install sensors for every type of data in your house, you would need sensors for temperature, humidity, electrical control switches, Bluetooth receivers, and transmitters, among others. Each sensor would collect data and relay it to the central hub, typically in its preferred format.

This diversity can wreak havoc on any system. In marketing, sources vary from web analytics to advertising and offline interactions, with each category presenting widely different data formats. Building a 360-degree view of the customer in your CDP critically depends on the structure and format of the data, which is where server-side tag managers (SSTMs) become indispensable.

There are 5 event data collection challenges that server-side tag managers help you overcome:

• Integrating disparate data sources
• Maintaining data integrity and timeliness
• Overcoming data silos
• Handling varying data formats
• Navigating privacy regulations

Integrating disparate data sources

The sheer number of martech tools represents a daunting challenge for modern marketers. The variety and diversity of these tools have created data management headaches, partly explaining the rising popularity of CDPs. A server-side tag management system like MetaRouter acts as a universal translator. It ensures that data, regardless of source or format, is harmonized, normalized, and synchronized to your CDP in a ready-to-use format.

Maintaining data integrity and timeliness

Composable martech, an important trend in the rise of CDPs, suggests that marketers should be able to assemble an ideal tech stack of customizable, scalable, and flexible tools. The challenge with composable martech lies in maintaining data integrity across all systems. For instance, you may have an excellent solution for web analytics, but does it integrate effectively with your advertising platforms or marketing automation tools?

Server-side tools like MetaRouter not only ensure data is collected and processed in real-time but also guarantee the data is accurate and clean. Client-side tools can get bogged down in the browser, slowing data distribution and/or negatively impacting user experience through increased page load times.

Overcoming data silos

Storing data in different systems creates multiple versions of the "truth;" marketers have long sought a single-source-of-truth to create a complete view of the customer journey. This is the power of CDPs combined with the data collection capabilities of server-side solutions. SSTMs help break down data silos by providing a centralized data collection and distribution mechanism. Rather than fetching data from multiple systems, your SSTM synchronizes data across all platforms.

Handling varying data formats

CDPs excel as a repository for customer data whereas server-side data collection tools excel at data collection and distribution. A key component of data distribution is handling different data formats and sending it to destination systems in a preferred format.Server-side tools like MetaRouter allow you to fine-tune data outputs, ensuring that all data, regardless of its source, is ready for analysis and action.

Navigating privacy regulations

CDPs don't handle consent enforcement which is another reason why SSTMs are so valuable. For example, MetaRouter ensures that data is compliant at the moment of collection before it goes anywhere (CDP, warehouse, etc). This is critical when navigating strict privacy regulations and meeting audit requirements. With a unified data pipeline like MetaRouter, you can quickly flag noncompliance and enable your team to perform automated data checks more efficiently.

The Role of Server-Side Tag Management in Event Data Collection

Server-side tools function like various sensors throughout your smart home, acting as data conduits that detect events in your “marketing house” and send this data back to your central AI. Unlike traditional data sensors, server-side tools also enable fine-tuning of the data normalization and transformation process.

As mentioned earlier, SSTMs can manipulate data before its distribution. Automating the data transformation and normalization process ensures smooth integration of data from diverse sources such as web analytics, digital advertising, and CRM systems. SSTMs collect data, transfer it to the server, and then allow you to control subsequent actions. For example, normalizing form submission data into a standardized JSON object or removing anonymizing data before passing it to a vendor's endpoint.

Unlike traditional client-side tag managers, which place vendor scripts directly on web pages allowing broad access to user behavior, SSTMs offer a more selective approach. Security and privacy consents are enforced at the point of data collection, meaning the data is vetted before being sent to vendors or your CDP. This prevents compliance from becoming problematic for your organizing and is an important differentiator between SSTM and client-side tag managers.

SSTMs enhance performance both for end users of your website and for your marketing activities. First, SSTMs are able to scale much better than client-side solutions to process large volumes of data without impacting user experience.The data is processed on your servers, not in the user’s browser. Second, SSTMs reduce data latency and enable CDPs to act on that data quickly for features like real-time personalization.

One of the challenges in data event collection is matching that data to end users. Not only has the rise of remote work made match rates more difficult, but increasingly browsers and ad blockers prevent tools from making these necessary connections. SSTMs such as MetaRouter utilize first-party cookie tracking to connect to the end user and monitor required events. This results in significantly higher match rates within your CDP.

‍

Use Cases for Server-Side Tag Manager and CDP Integration

Let’s explore a few use cases for SSTM data event collection and how it integrates with CDPs. We will cover the following scenarios:

• E-commerce Cart and Checkout Tracking
• Form Submission Tracking
• Mobile App Engagement

E-commerce Cart and Checkout Tracking

Optimizing the e-commerce cart and checkout flow represents a significant opportunity for retail brands. Addressing friction points in the checkout process can lead to dramatic improvements in revenue and user experience. SSTMs detect and analyze where customers abandon shopping carts, enabling targeted interventions such as personalized or discount reminders.

SSTMs are ideal as they enable real-time data collection and distribution, allowing automated systems to respond almost instantly. Between reducing data latency and improving match rates, integrating data events collected by SSTMs with your CDP can result in significant improvements. Learn more about this in our case study with a Fortune 100 Grocery Retailer.

Form Submission Tracking

Form tracking is a critical component of any demand generation strategy, serving as an essential online customer contact point and commonly used in lead scoring models and automation. Using data collected in forms to ensure high match rates with existing records in the CDP allows automation processes to run effectively. Form data can be used to enrich customer profiles and integrating this information with data collected from other platforms is table stakes for modern marketing operations teams.

SSTMs not only improve data streaming from various channels and platforms but also significantly optimize your website performance. This improvement is achieved by transferring scripts from the client to the server, ensuring that data processing does not burden the browser. By removing third-party tags and working with MetaRouter a Fortune 50 Retailer was able to dramatically improve page load time.

Mobile App Engagement

Data event tracking from your mobile app is a crucial element of any data-driven marketing strategy. This can be a challenge, particularly trying to implement event tracking client side, as you risk bogging down the performance of your application. SSTMs are an ideal solution to this challenge as they improve app performance while making data collection scalable.

Managing data collected from mobile apps is challenging, especially with strict regulations such as those imposed by Apple. Companies such as HOMER Learning use MetaRouter to securely collect and process data, adhering to stringent privacy regulations. This gives companies the best of both worlds: ethically, regulation compliant data collection and rich datasets that can improve the customer experience. Read more about how MetaRouter worked with HOMER Learning.

Better Together - SSTM Event Collection and CDPs

If your marketing home is to be truly smart, you need more than just a good “brain” like an AI or CDP; you also need top-notch data sensors. Server-side tools such as MetaRouter are the ideal companions to your CDP solution. They enable data collection from web properties and mobile devices via a first-party endpoint, dramatically improving match rates and preventing blocks by browsers or ad blockers.

SSTMs function as high-tech sensors strategically placed throughout a smart home, capable of collecting any data you require and ensuring compliance with data protection and privacy regulations through normalization and distribution. SSTMs function as high-tech sensors strategically placed throughout a smart home, capable of collecting any data you require and ensuring compliance with data protection and privacy regulations through normalization and distribution.

Embracing the shift to server-side tag managers is a strategic move to future-proof your data collection and distribution. Tools like MetaRouter not only offer the versatility to track data across multiple platforms and distribute it to key endpoints but also enhance user experience and marketing outcomes. Ready to enhance your marketing strategy? Book a demo with MetaRouter today.