50% of users tracked with consent, up from 24% after implementing server-side tracking | Tag Manager Italia

MecShopping is a prestigious Italian eCommerce company, elected number one for 2022-2023 for the "Fashion and Accessories" category out of more than 7,000 online shops in the running (Source: survey conducted by Corriere della Sera and Statista).

MecShopping has more than 8 shops and over 50 categories of clothing and footwear, accessories and underwear for men, women and children available on its online shop, with more than 100 offers and promotions active throughout the year.

MecShopping needed to analyze in a detailed and timely manner the tracking of both the navigation and conversion path of users between the numerous product categories, and the interactions with the numerous product filters and features.

In particular, it was essential to accurately analyze the success performance of the different active offers and the related advertising campaigns in order to optimize their conversion rate and return on investment.

In addition to this, to optimize:

• tracking, to make it more GDPR-compliant server side tracking.
• the collection and passage of more punctual data from the feed of products uploaded on eCommerce to the Google Merchant Centre and advertising platforms.

MecShopping has eCommerce with almost 100,000 products and a Merchant Centre (i.e., the tool that allows you to manage the Google display of the inventory of products available in your online shop and/or shop) with almost 2 million active items. 

For this reason, as the first phase of the consultancy, TagManagerItalia, top partner of Stape, conducted an analysis and technical audit of the active tracking implementations on the entire e-eCommerce.

To address the identified requirements, they developed a customized measurement plan in collaboration with the MecShopping team. This plan was designed to:

• Define the overarching business and marketing goals for monitoring and accomplishment.
• Determine user actions within the eCommerce platform that need tracking.
• Identify navigational and User Experience (UX) activities for monitoring.

This allowed the team to implement and optimize the configuration of Google Analytics 4 with custom tracking events for eCommerce according to the defined marketing and business objectives.

With GA4 configuration it was possible to:

• make advanced tracking of user interaction with product cards and filters.
• identify possible friction points blocking users along their conversion path (e.g., errors in filling in form fields).
• make the management of cookie banners and user tracking consents more efficient and convenient via a consent management platform and Google Tag Manager.
• create Audiences and remarketing Segments in Google Ads server-side to optimize campaigns and their conversion rate.

... and much more.

Specifically, through GA4 they managed the configuration and tracking codes of the platforms at Server-Side level:

• Criteo
• Facebook
• Google Ads conversion server side
• GA4 server-side configuration
• TikTok

The tracking implementations have enabled MecShopping to:

• make the reporting and analysis of the user's conversion path more precise and clearer.
• optimize the performance of offers.
• increase the conversion rate and return on investment of active advertising campaigns.

In particular, thanks to the large number of events and browsing sessions tracked with the new implementations, MecShopping was able to exploit the potential of GA4's predictive audiences (i.e., a segment of users who, based on historical data collected in GA4, are most likely to complete a specific conversion action) to significantly increase the purchase rate on its shop.

In addition, the optimisation of the Cookie Banner's layout and style allowed them to double the number of tracking consent acceptances from users from 24% to 50%, thus collecting a greater quantity and quality of accurate data to launch more targeted and profitable advertising campaigns.