53% more Google Ads value measured after moving tracking to the server | Obsidian Digital

Ecooking was founded in 2016 and sells high end skincare and makeup products in both retail and online. 

While most of the revenue comes from email thanks to a loyal customer base that appreciates the products, both Facebook and Google Ads are essential in getting new people to know the brand.

Google Ads in particular was limited as campaigns did not look profitable. High competition in the segment means higher click-prices and that scaling is not as easy as just enabling a Smart Shopping-campaign and turning up the volume.

For this reason, Ecooking and agency Obsidian Digital decided to improve the tracking-setup.

While Facebook was already running on serverside tracking thanks to Conversions API Gateway, Google Ads was not. But the CMS - Shopware - was already outputting the relevant dataLayer-parameters making it easy to set up tracking using Google Tag Manager.

Agency Obsidian Digital set up a serverside Google Tag Manager-account and used Stape.io to quickly enable serverside tracking for both:

• Google Analytics 4
• Google Ads
• and also preparing tags for Klaviyo as Ecooking is soon changing CRM-systems

The work took an estimated 10 hours including everything from setting up subdomains to enable first party cookies to uploading the finished changes in the new serverside setup.

To verify the results of the implementation, the old client-side tracking setup was kept running simultaneously with the new server-side setup. After 30 days, the results were compared to measure an increment in lift. The results in this blog post is measured as the difference between the conversion and value measured with client side and serverside in the same period.

After enabling server-side tracking via Stape.io, the results were significantly improved in both Google Analytics and Google Ads:

• Google Analytics: 19 % increase in measured revenue
• Google Analytics: 17 % increase in measured products sold
• Google Ads: 53 % increase in measured revenue
• Google Ads: 57 % increase in measured conversions

These results powered by Stape.io now allow Ecooking and agency Obsidian Digital to scale campaigns that are profitable, but previously did not appear so - thus enabling further growth for the company using digital marketing.