Server-side data collection is crucial in the customer data industry. The growing adoption of server-side processing is driven by modern challenges facing web developers and analysts, particularly in three key areas: speed, accuracy, and privacy.

While client-side solutions aren't inherently bad, they slow down your site's performance and negatively affect the user's experience. Web users have become increasingly impatient: 83% of users expect websites to load in three seconds or less, and 47% won't wait any longer than two seconds for a website to load. Slow websites cost retailers an estimated $2.6 billion in lost sales annually –  a staggering figure, especially considering it’s a solvable issue!

The rise of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) has made it possible to create a comprehensive 360-degree profile of customers. However, organizations often struggle with the accuracy of data collection across web properties. Modern browsers impose restrictions, ad blockers (used by nearly a third of internet users) prevent data collection, and all collected data must be validated and normalized. The main strength of client-side data processing is also its critical weakness: its reliance on browsers leaves it vulnerable to these restrictions.

How data is collected is as important as collecting it in the first place. With landmark regulations like GDPR and CCPA imposing stringent rules on data collection and consumer rights, it's essential to have a clear audit trail for your customer's data. Consent not only needs to be given, but it needs to be enforced or your organization could be exposed to legal risks. Server-side platforms provide the tooling you need to enforce compliance at the moment of data collection – ensuring data collected from customers meets the highest privacy standards.

Server-side data collection addresses these challenges effectively through server-side events. By shifting data handling to the server, server-side events ensure that every piece of data is processed efficiently, accurately, and in full compliance with privacy regulations. This approach allows data to be meticulously processed on your server, enabling real-time insights and ensuring that every interaction is captured with precision.

In this post, we're going to do a deep dive on server-side events and why this is an essential topic for customer data collection.

Understanding Server-Side Events

What are server-side events? Server-side events refer to data interactions and activities that are processed directly on the server, rather than in the user’s browser. By managing data collection, processing, and distribution on your server, server-side events offer greater control over every aspect of data collection compared to client-side tracking.

Think of server-side events as an air traffic control system. With dozens, if not hundreds, of airplanes in the sky, it’s the air traffic controller’s job to track each one individually, ensuring they reach their destinations safely and on time. Now, imagine if each plane were responsible for its own flight path and approach, without coordination from ground control – the result would be chaos. How could the planes coordinate with all the other planes in the air?

Client-side tracking is like asking each plane to manage its own data processing and distribution. In this scenario, the browser is burdened with handling multiple events simultaneously, leading to performance issues and data accuracy problems.

However, server-side events act as the air traffic controller, orchestrating the flow of data and processing it efficiently on the server. This approach relieves the browser of the burden of tracking and coordinating, allowing it to focus exclusively on delivering a positive user experience.

Comparison of Server-Side vs. Client-Side Events

Comparing server-side event collection with client-side event collection gives us a baseline for understanding the benefits of each method. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with client-side tracking – for many organizations, it’s a perfectly acceptable solution.

However, when you have requirements around page performance and speed, data accuracy, and data security compliance considerations, server-side is the logical choice. Let’s break down the differences so you can understand how each system handles events.

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Advantages of Using Server-Side Events Over Client-Side Events

The key difference between server-side and client-side data collection lies in scale. To get a sense of the difference, let's consider an analogy of two different mail delivery systems. In the first system, the mail delivery person sorts through your mail on the go. They literally show up at your doorstep, open their mailbag, and start finding letters addressed to you. You'd likely look on in disbelief at the inefficiency of this method but it might work if you live in a rural area where there are only a few houses.

In the second system, the post office uses a central postal sorting system. They organize everything prior to distribution, ensuring that each piece of mail reaches its destination quickly and accurately. Instead of being overwhelmed on your doorstep (not to mention drawing perplexed looks), the mail delivery person drops off your mail smoothly and accurately.

There is a use-case for both types of mail delivery–just as client-side and server-side have their uses. But, as you can guess, server-side is the method that best handles the challenges of scale in a modern business environment. Let's take a closer look at the specific advantages of server-side event tracking.

• Improved performance
• Increased data accuracy
• Better security
• Improved privacy compliance
• Scalability
• Greater control and flexibility
• Reduced impact of browser variability
• Comprehensive data enrichment

Improved performance

Server-side eventing unburdens your browser. This reduces the number of scripts that need to run client-side and allows the browser to focus on user experience. With server-side, events are sent to the server, processed, and then distributed to various endpoints, rather than attempting all that in the browser.

Increased data accuracy

Reducing data loss from ad blockers and browser restrictions is key. Server-side solutions allow you to move event collection from third-party scripting to your own, first-party script. This is a key component of improving data accuracy, a benefit for businesses that rely on precise analytics to make decisions.

Better security

Server-side eventing moves the processing of sensitive data, like payment information, to your servers. This reduces the surface area for potential attacks and allows you to put strict security and encryption controls. For ecommerce stores and retailers, this is a critical advantage and can help you and your customers sleep better at night.

Improved privacy compliance

The importance of privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA are hard to overstate. Adhering to these standards isn’t just an ethical and moral obligation; it’s a legal requirement for doing international business. Server-side events provide a more controlled environment for managing user data, allowing for enforcement of content and providing your team with a clear audit trail should you ever need it.

Scalability

As your data needs grow and mature, you need a system that can grow with you. By centralizing event processing with server-side tooling, you can manage a higher volume of events without impacting user experience. Instead of dragging down your page performance with additional scripts, you can add additional server-side processes and endpoints to enhance and enrich data. This makes server-side an ideal choice for large digital operations like eCommerce platforms.

Greater control and flexibility

With client-side tracking, the pixels or tracking code you install are defined by the vendor, and the scope of what is tracked isn’t always clear. Server-side events give you full control over data processing and distribution logic. You only need to share necessary information with 3rd party vendors, such as advertising partners. Additionally, you can enrich, filter, and manage data before it reaches endpoints.

Reduced impact of browser variability

Each browser has its own environment and restrictions. Unlike client-side tracking, server-side events are not dependent on the user's browser. This variability creates subtle yet detectable differences in data quality and accuracy. Server-side events are configured based on direct interactions with your web property ensuring your data collection remains stable and uniform across all browsers.

Comprehensive data enrichment

We've touched on this a few times, but server-side events can integrate with other server-side systems and API endpoints. This means that you can achieve real-time data enrichment and processing that isn't possible with client-side events. This is a significant benefit if you’re using a CDP and want to create comprehensive customer profiles for marketing personalization.

How Server-Side Eventing Works

Server-side eventing in tag management represents a fundamental shift in how data is collected, processed, and distributed. Unlike client-side methods that rely on the browser to capture and send data to various endpoints, server-side eventing centralizes these tasks on the server. This results in improved performance, data accuracy, security, and compliance.

Client-side tracking has enjoyed popularity and wide-spread adoption in the industry. In part, this is due to the fact that server-side solutions are still a relatively new technology. Another factor is that client-side tracking is very easy to set up – you have a developer install the code on your website, then you can use the tag manager to start deploying data collection tags. While client-side tracking has been popular due to its ease of setup—allowing marketing teams to deploy tags without heavy technical involvement—it comes with significant drawbacks, including tag bloat, performance issues, security and privacy concerns, and a lack of proper governance.

Server-side eventing is like setting up a smart home. For this analogy, let’s assume you need two things: sensors to pick up data and a central processing unit. The sensors are how you detect events throughout your home and provide data points to the central processing unit. Those sensors will pick up data events like current room temperature, motion detection, and perhaps electricity usage. By relaying that information to a central processing unit, you can then begin to integrate this data with complex logic. For example, if a room drops below a certain temperature then increase the heat.

If server-side eventing is like a smart home, what functionality do we need to consider? Let's play with this analogy to understand better how server-side eventing works under the hood. Here are the five major functions of server-side events in modern data collection:

1. Event collection
2. Data processing
3. Data distribution
4. Enhanced security and privacy compliance
5. Monitoring and debugging

Event collection

Events are user interactions with your web properties such as clicks, form submissions, or shopping cart interactions. You need a way to detect each event and relay that data back to the central server for processing. In your smart home, you'd accomplish this by placing sensors in key locations in your home. On a website, this means configuring scripts to sense when certain interactions occur and what to do with that data.

In client-side tracking, the sensors (browser) must both detect and process events, leading to performance slowdowns. In a smart home, this would be like asking each sensor to not only detect temperature but also decide how to adjust the thermostat—a task better suited for a central processing unit. This is why we see that client-side solutions have a negative impact on performance. With server-side, the sensors will send data to a central server for processing – they have less work to do, and can be specialized to do a better job of data collection. 

Think about it this way: in client-side tracking, when a user fills out a form, that event data is collected and then distributed to potentially multiple vendors such as web analytics, advertising platforms, CDPs, and your marketing automation system.That's a lot of processing for a little sensor. In server-side, the data from the event is collected and then sent to a central server for processing.

Data processing

Once event data reaches the server, it is then processed according to logic and rules that you have defined. The server is much more capable of processing this data than your web browser and, as a benefit to your web visitors, that processing is isolated from the browsing experience. 

If this were a smart home, then you'd utilize the central server as a hub where all data is sent from multiple devices such as security cameras, thermostats, and lighting. Instead of having sensors try and process data, you can create a complete picture of current events and respond accordingly. This is critical for real-time automation, such as adjusting thermostat settings or locking the doors when you leave.

For server-side, this means processing data in a way that considers the full context of your analytics requirements. This could mean that the form submission on your website needs to be normalized prior to distribution to other systems – simple things like normalizing country names or structuring the JSON payload have a big impact on upstream data quality. At this stage, you may even want to enrich data events by requesting additional information from a vendor about users.

Data distribution

After processing the data event, the server is ready to distribute the data to various endpoints. These endpoints represent marketing and data tools essential for running your business such as advertising vendors, ecommerce platforms, your CDP or CRM, or web analytics. By having the server process the data first, you are putting a vital data quality check in place to ensure you have a standardized data set.

In your smart home, this could mean taking a data signal from one sensor and sending it to a connected device. For example, reading the room temperature in your bedrooms and then adjusting your thermostat to ensure your continued comfort. The same logic occurs with server-side where certain events will meet the criteria for distribution to various endpoints. So form submission data may get routed to your web analytics, advertising platform, and your CDP.

Enhanced security and privacy compliance

For many businesses, it's critical to control exactly what data is shared with various endpoints and vendors. It doesn't make sense for you to send a thermostat information about whether your garage door is opened, but with client-side tagging, this is essentially what happens. Server-side data processing and distribution functions ensure that you choose what data to send to vendors. You don’t install vendor scripts on your website, which can track user behavior; instead, you only send relevant data. You can even anonymize data collected prior to distribution, a key benefit for privacy conscious organizations.

Monitoring and debugging

One of the advantages of server-side is the ability to set up debugging and monitoring processes as part of your data collection practices. Client-side tools can be notoriously difficult to troubleshoot, whereas server-side tools are developer-friendly and allow for integration with your testing and Q/A processes. 

Imagine leaving for work and forgetting to close your garage door. Your smart home system should monitor this and send an alert based on logic that something isn’t right (e.g., your garage door has been open for more than 30 minutes). This error is reported to your phone through an app where you can close the garage door remotely. The same applies to server-side which allows you robust detection abilities to help you fix issues before they affect your data pipelines.

Future-Proofing Data Collection with Server-Side Events

Server-side eventing is a powerful new tool for data collection. As we've seen, it provides a separation of concerns – the browser is used to provide great user experience and data processing is moved to your servers. This boosts performance by allowing data collection and distribution to exist independently. Data is sent to the server for processing, potentially normalization and enrichment, while event collection is unencumbered from the distribution requirements.

By centralizing data collection, we can enjoy numerous benefits. Not only can we improve website performance, we can create standard data sets that ensure pristine data quality for web events. Like our smart home system that brings order, efficiency, and control to your house, server-side eventing gives us these benefits for our digital environment.

Are you ready to embrace server-side? It's the future-proof way to handle data collection and distribution at scale. The benefits extend to your web users who've come to expect faster, more performant browsing experiences as the norm. The time to make the shift is now! Get a demo of MetaRouter and experience the server-side difference for yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do all client-side integrations need to be moved server-side?

Ideally, yes.

With most vendors, however, the answer is no. The reason why is that anonymous events cannot typically be attributed to any persisting user identifier, because identity still primarily relies on cookies (although that is rapidly changing, which we will discuss shortly). Cookies are pieces of information that live in the browser and signal to your vendors who the user is.

First-party cookies are useful for the owner of the website that a user is choosing to visit. For example, Walmart's product team if you visit walmart.com.

Second-party cookies are those set by common social media, advertising and search tools to claim credit for directing traffic to a website or encouraging a purchase. Users must visit these sites in order for them to set cookies.

Third-party cookies are useful for vendors that provide widespread advertising and analytical services. Companies and advertisers use these services to generate relevant advertisements when a user visits a certain website. Typically, users never visit these sites.

Each type of cookie is essential to tracking ecosystems and personalization, and each lives exclusively within the user's browser.

Therefore, if you're producing events outside of the browser, there is no way to tie cookies to those users. Any measurement and attribution you'd like to perform that relies on a persisting identity of a user from the time they first visit your site as an anonymous user, to the time they provide their identity to you and purchase something, ceases to exist.

The only way to identify a user in a server-side setting is if the user actively provides their information to you, and depending on your industry and web traffic, that may represent a fraction of your total user base.

How do other companies handle integrating data server-side?

Other companies run server-side and client-side data in conjunction with each other. A significant limiting factor of running data server-side is that not all vendors support APIs that can process this type of data. Google is an example of a vendor that generally does not accept data produced server-side. They are developing a new solution for server-side eventing, but even that solution will require Google's client-side tag to run.

Another limiting factor is simply the data that can be collected on the server. As mentioned previously, identifying anonymous users is typically impossible for server-side events, which could be a serious detriment to vendor functionality.

How does MetaRouter solve server-side?

MetaRouter enables powerful server-side integrations in the market by addressing the core issues that impact server-side tracking. Instead of relying on server-side APIs, we collect all the data that an event generated client-side would contain, from the 1st-party context, and send that off to servers that our customers control. 

In other words, all data is integrated server-side.

MetaRouter also enriches each event with identity information (whether from cookies or non-cookie based identity solutions) that we pull off the page from a light-weight script we call the Sync Injector. Event parameters are mapped to each client-side or server-side API. The end result is a server-side event that looks exactly the same as a client-side event, even though no third-party javascript is ever involved in the processing of data.

What if identifiers aren't based on cookies?

Cookies have been the predominant means for you, your partners, and your partners' partners to track users on your website. A quick search on Google will yield dozens of articles describing the "death of the third-party cookie", which is a serious cause for concern for many organizations. It seems all but certain- the online ecosystem will be evolving to some new solution in the next couple years.

MetaRouter will provide timely, ongoing support for the prominent post-cookie alternatives that arise. Keep in mind, third-party cookies (and to an extent, second-party cookies) will be increasingly subject to restrictions and regulation, but first-party cookies will largely be unaffected due to the critical role they play in allowing a website to function properly (such as bypassing login screens). MetaRouter operates in an entirely first-party context when deployed within your own private cloud environment.

The solutions that arise will still likely involve some sort of identifier, whether it's email addresses, phone numbers, Unified ID 2.0, or others. We'll provide you with the means to connect to your vendors' identity sync APIs, so when the next solution comes along, you'll be able to include any IDs that are required to maintain your vendors' functionality.