Taking Control of Your Data with Server-Side GTM: Durability Summit NYC 2023

Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about "Durability Summit NYC 2023 | Taking Control of Your Data with Server-Side GTM"
Server-side GTM moves data collection from the user's browser (client-side) to a company-owned server, giving you more control over your data. This approach reduces the number of tags loading on your website, improves performance, and provides greater privacy by making data flows invisible to the public.
The main benefits include: explicit data routing with complete logs, ability to enrich data before sending it to platforms, enhanced privacy protection, support for data streams from any source (web, mobile, in-store), direct streaming to data warehouses, and reduced time to insights with real-time capabilities.
Server-side GTM helps with GDPR compliance by giving you complete control over where your data is processed and stored, allowing you to clean identifiers before sending data to third parties, and providing explicit logs of where data is sent. This makes it easier to respond to data subject requests and demonstrate compliance with data protection regulations.
For optimal GDPR compliance, you should host your server-side GTM infrastructure on EU-based servers with an EU-based hosting provider like Hetzner in Finland. Using bare metal servers rather than cloud providers adds an extra layer of compliance by eliminating third-party access risks that are common with major cloud platforms.
Yes, server-side GTM helps address the deprecation of third-party cookies by enabling you to build a first-party data infrastructure. It allows you to collect and process data on your own servers using first-party domains, giving you more control over your measurement strategy as the advertising landscape evolves.
Server-side GTM improves website performance by reducing the number of JavaScript tags loading directly on your website. Instead of each marketing or analytics platform requiring its own tag on the client side, data is sent to your server in a single request and then distributed to various platforms from there, resulting in faster page load times.
In the video, Tyler shares how server-side GTM helped a company continue using Google Analytics in France despite regulatory restrictions. By owning the server infrastructure, they could clean identifiers before sending data to Google Analytics and store the data in a French data center, maintaining analytics capabilities while remaining compliant with local regulations.
EU-based server-side GTM hosting on bare metal servers provides stronger GDPR compliance by keeping data within the EU and eliminating third-party access risks associated with major cloud providers. Services like gdpr-server-tracking.eu offer enhanced privacy features for hashing and filtering sensitive data, along with competitive pricing compared to cloud solutions.