Client-side pixel-led targeting is dead. All right, it’s soon pretty much going to be—two moments of silence in advance. So now, make way for server-side tracking.
But why is that? What’s happening out there? Client-side tracking, which has been prevalent for a while now, poses multiple limitations, the primary one being data privacy compliance, and that’s for a good reason. The other challenges these poses are degraded website performance, limitations in mapping a user’s journey, etc.
On the other hand, server-side tracking addresses all of these problems while collecting data on the server-side. This approach, which is fast becoming the de facto standard globally, helps provide improved transparency by tracking server-side events such as:
GDPR compliance: Since the tracking is now being introduced from the server, server-side search for marketers helps them own available customers, first-party cookies/data and avoid blind spots.
Unified customer journey: By combining user & customer events across channels and devices using deterministic and probabilistic matches, marketers can now decide on the remarketing approach(es) for highly-engaged users by matching their user profiles.
Site speed & performance: This is a case of pixel transformation. Instead of loading a bunch of analytics & ad-channel pixels or tags on the users’ browser (client-side), the server running the website or your website’s CDN can define tags while ensuring that the webpage loads faster and delivers a compelling experience to the users.
Approximately 50-60% of tracking data is lost due to ad-blocking software and intelligent tracking prevention. This is especially true for client-side tracking. However, server-side tracking circumvents these challenges.
To set up server-side tracking for your business, simple infrastructure is all that’s needed. The key is to decide what information points are actually to track. Collecting everything – IP, URL, host, path, language, etc., and content the users accessed – is ideal for the backend to profile the user more or less accurately, followed up by targeted remarketing ads across intended channels.
For server-side tracking, Magic Pixel’s integration with a lightweight SDK enables websites to fire up the SDK on the server when a user is accessing the website resulting in improved site load-speed performance, among other insights.
Marketers now can collect first-party cookies/data and configure pixels or media tags using a simple user interface.
![Server-side tracking made easy for Marketers](http://magicpixel.io/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/11668654_20945659-1024x1024.jpg)