How server-side tracking affects paid campaign attribution

This post will discuss how server-side tracking can assist with paid campaign attribution. We’ll review its benefits and introduce you to some Stape tools that can help you with attribution tracking on the side of the server.

Attribution tracking (what it is and how it works)

Attribution tracking uses different software to track channels and campaign efforts to determine which channel to attribute conversion to. In simple words, attribution tracking helps you understand which channels help you reach your advertising goals. This way, you can determine which channels to use, how much effort to give them, and what channels aren’t getting you anywhere.

Why accurate paid campaign attribution matters

Attribution tracking helps marketers understand the impact of their efforts across different channels and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

What happens without campaign attribution tracking:

• Marketers have no reliable data on how to distribute their budget and work across various channels, what channels, campaigns, and touchpoints to focus on to get the most conversions, and what channels to reconsider.

• Marketers have to spend time, resources, and money in all directions randomly, not knowing where to push more and where to stop.

For this reason, marketers love tracking attribution, a vital criterion of their efforts. With fine-tuned attribution, you don’t need to guess; you always know what brought your campaign to success (or failure, arguably even more important to track).

The diagram below shows why tracking paid campaign attribution is a must.

As you can see, understanding the impact of your advertising tactics is crucial for business success. With a suitable attribution model, you can clearly understand where most conversions are coming from and how to keep them up. Let’s move on to tools to help you with attribution tracking.

Server-side tagging vs. client-side tagging for paid campaign attribution tracking

Campaign attribution can be monitored using client-side or server-side tracking. Let’s examine each option and its benefits and drawbacks. We hope this analysis helps you decide which option best suits your attribution tracking needs.

Client-side tracking for paid campaign attribution

Client-side tracking is a well-established and easy-to-implement tracking method with many advantages. It provides real-time insight into user interactions, gives comprehensive data on user engagement, and collects various types of data (clicks, page views, conversions).

It looks good, doesn’t it? Well, there’s a catch. If client-side tracking methods were flawless, server-side ones wouldn’t be needed. Unfortunately, this popular tracking method has some significant drawbacks that you should consider.

Drawbacks of client-side tracking:

• Browser extensions can block the client side, causing massive data loss.

• Some browsers (Safari, for instance) limit client-side tracking even without additional plugins.

• Cookie deletion can compromise client-side data accuracy.

• Client-side tracking—is becoming more limited by data privacy regulations like CCPA, GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, and more.

• Client-side tracking slows down the client's website performance, which can cause customer annoyance.

Let’s move to the server-side option now and check what it offers.

Server-side tracking for paid campaign attribution

Server-side tracking has many advantages regarding paid campaign attribution.

Benefits of server-side tracking:

• It lets you track website interactions directly, thus minimizing data loss.

• It allows you to bypass browser limitations and client-side ad blockers easily.

• It enables compliant collection, processing, and storage of tracking data, ensuring user data privacy compliance.

• Server-side attribution tracking lets you build enhanced attribution models based on the extensive data you collect. You may only know how much data goes sideways unnoticed once you try server-side tracking. Reduced data loss is what all marketers try to reach, and server-side tracking can be the answer.

• It allows you to depend less on third-party cookies. This is very handy at this point since the days of third-party cookies are numbered.

• It offers excellent scalability. It efficiently handles large volumes of data and can optimize your ad budget based on extensive customer data.

Like any tool, server-side tracking has its challenges:

• Compared to client-side tracking, server-side technology is still young, so there is less information about it compared to client-side tracking.

• It requires some technical expertise to set up. You may need to hire a specialized staff member if you need help.

• You need to pay for the cloud server.

• You might also need help integrating server-side tracking with third-party tools and platforms if ready-to-use custom solutions are not developed.

Server-side tracking is a promising, efficient, and compliant technology that can help with paid campaign attribution. However, setting up server-side tracking from scratch can be daunting without help.

Don’t worry, though — Stape has your back! We know that server-side attribution tracking has numerous benefits, and we're happy to help our clients maximize them.

Why server-side tracking positively affects paid campaign attribution

1. Server-side tracking prolongs cookie lifetime.

Almost all browsers, except Chrome, have built-in tracking protection mechanisms that decrease cookie lifetime. This applies not only to third-party cookies but also to first-party cookies. Besides, Chrome will also phase out third-party cookies by the end of 2025, meaning that the cookie lifetime restriction will affect all popular browsers in 2025.

Why are cookie restrictions so necessary for paid campaign attribution? To accurately match concern to a campaign, ad, or keyword, advertising platforms use click ID. These parameters are added to the URLs and are written in the cookies of the user's browser if a user clicks on the ad. Before all the restrictions, it was possible to store cookies for up to 2 years; this way, click IDs remained in the user browsers for a long time, and it was possible to match a conversion to the campaign or add.

When the conversion tracking pixel or event was triggered, together with the purchase information, click IDs were sent to the advertising platform, allowing us to understand which click led to the conversion.

With the help of server-side tracking, you can increase cookie lifetime. There are multiple ways on how to do that using stape:

• Same origin domain

• Own CDN

• Cookie keeper

• Cookie extender tag

2. Allows tracking users with AdBlockers.

The popularity of ad blockers started to rise, thus negatively affecting tracking and attribution. With the help of server-side tracking and Stape custom loader power up, you can make tracking scripts invisible to ad blockers. It means that if your web pixel is blocked, advertising and affiliate networks will still receive information about events from the server.

Unlike web tracking, attribution with server-side tracking relies on cookies and user data. If cookies are not available, attribution will depend on user data. This means that advertising networks will try to convert users who converted on your website to users in their database by using user data such as first and last name, email, phone, etc.

Stape solutions for paid campaign attribution tracking

Stape created a Facebook conversion API tag for the Google Tag Manager server container.

Among the benefits:

• Works with Google Analytics 4 and Data Tag.

• Extracts event data from any client.

• Parses server client and automatically adds necessary parameters to the request.

• Sends user data to increase the match quality score.

• Sets up event deduplication.

Server-side conversion tracking in Google Ads is easier with Stape, too. Server-side Google Tag Manager can help you move your Google Ads conversion tracking tags from the webpage to the server.

Benefits of Google Ads (Adwords) Server-Side Tracking:

• Increased accuracy of conversion tracking

• Improved PageSpeed

Did you know that due to tracking restrictions and the stable work of the client-side tracking, your affiliates can lose up to 40% in the commission? Affiliate Conversion Tag from Stape is there to help you fix this issue. With this tag, you can track pageviews and conversions from affiliate partners.

We also created a Facebook Offline Conversion Tag to let you set up offline conversion more quickly and cheaply than before. You can use it to boost your FB campaign results and improve attribution.

You can find all of our solutions and guides on using them here.

How to switch to server-side tracking

Take the following steps to start with server-side tracking of paid campaign attribution.

Pick a tool or platform for server-side tracking that meets your needs. When considering different options, check company credibility, pricing, support access, and functionality. It’s also a good idea to check the scalability options you get.

Check the tool’s data safety policy of the tracking tool you decide to use. Choose a compliant server-side tracking tool to align your data tracking needs with the latest data privacy regulations. For instance, Stape offers EU-owned proxy servers for sGTM to use Google Analytics in a GDPR-compliant way.

Set a budget. Based on your needs and budget possibilities, choose how much you spend on tracking. Some platforms offer a free trial or even a free plan. Stape offers a free plan to explore the platform's benefits for your business. With Stape, you do not need any technical background, and it takes around 5 minutes to deploy a server container.

Develop a tracking plan to maximize server-side tracking in the context of paid campaign attribution with your chosen tool. Outline the channels, touchpoints, and events that you want to track.

Make tracking consistent across different channels. Your data could be incomplete or inconsistent if you do not do it.

Integrate and combine the data you collect in a single analytics platform. This will give you a comprehensive picture of how customers interact with your business and analyze data in detail.

Visualize the data in simple dashboards or reports, especially high-volume assets. Massive amounts of server-side tracking data can be overwhelming without visualization. With it, though, it is easy to see trends, the most effective channels, marketing tactics, and failed attempts.

Monitor your tracking continuously to tune and tweak your paid campaign strategy when things aren’t going well.

Final thoughts

Regarding attribution tracking of paid campaigns, server-side tracking technology offers a lot. With server-side tracking, you can collect more data about the performance of your campaign than client-side tracking could ever provide. Server-side tracking helps you bypass adblockers and other limitations on the client side, giving you a clear, uninterrupted picture of how customers interact with your business in general and a given campaign in particular.

Server-side tracking can give you more control over the data you collect and help you meet all the data privacy regulations you fall under. Moreover, it can help you see the blind spots client-side tracking inevitably has. This way, you can improve your campaigns, build better attribution models, and get better business results.

If you are new to server-side tracking, consider a free plan from Stape to get started within minutes. No tech skills are required! If you are a fast-scaling business looking for high-volume data procession or an agency looking for partnership opportunities, we are happy to help, too! Contact our team of experts, and let’s make server-side tracking fun and effective together.