Book Consultation
Pricing
Cases
Videos
About us
Webinars
Book Consultation
Pricing
Cases
Videos
About us
Webinars
← Back to all videos

Server-Side Tagging: Data Quality or Data Quantity? - Simo Ahava's Analysis

facebook-pixelgoogle-analyticsserver-sidegdprprivacyadvanced
5/5This presentation delivers exceptional educational value with a comprehensive, technically detailed analysis of server-side tagging. Simo Ahava provides an honest, balanced assessment of both benefits and challenges, backed by deep technical knowledge and practical implementation considerations. The content is highly relevant to GDPR compliance issues, particularly regarding data transfers and privacy concerns.
"Server-Side Tagging: Data Quality or Data Quantity?" - Simo Ahava (Simmer - Helsinki, Finland)

In this insightful presentation from SUPERWEEK 2022, renowned analytics expert Simo Ahava explores Google Tag Manager's server-side tagging capabilities, examining both its promises and challenges. Speaking in English, Simo delves into the evolution of server-side tagging since its announcement two years prior, evaluating whether it has fulfilled its potential as a paradigm shift in digital marketing and analytics. The presentation begins by contrasting traditional client-side tagging with server-side approaches, explaining how server-side tagging introduces a middleman between browsers and marketing vendors. This architecture provides numerous advantages: data stream consolidation, improved client-side performance, enhanced security, better control over vendor data collection, and the ability to validate and enrich data before sending it to vendors. Simo identifies several key challenges, particularly the "Vegas Rule" – what happens in the server stays in the server – creating an opaqueness problem that makes auditing difficult. He also discusses implementation complexities, the current reliance on GA4 as the primary client-side technology, and the limitations of Google's App Engine infrastructure. The presentation covers technical deployment options, highlighting Cloud Run as a superior alternative to App Engine for many use cases, offering better cost efficiency for websites with fewer than 100 million monthly requests. Simo concludes with a wish list for future improvements, including asynchronous enrichment capabilities, native Cloud Run deployment, more Google Cloud APIs, and better transparency controls. From our perspective at gdpr-server-tracking.eu, this video perfectly illustrates why our EU-based server-side tagging solution addresses many of the concerns Simo raises. While Google's server-side tagging provides powerful capabilities, our platform offers significant advantages for EU businesses concerned about GDPR compliance and data transfers. By hosting server-side containers on bare metal servers in Finland through EU-based Hetzner, we eliminate the data transfer risks Simo mentions. Our solution provides the same technical benefits of server-side tagging while offering enhanced privacy controls, competitive pricing compared to cloud providers, and specialized features for hashing and filtering sensitive data. For organizations implementing server-side tagging with compliance in mind, our EU-based infrastructure provides a compelling alternative to cloud platforms while supporting all the technical capabilities Simo discusses.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about ""Server-Side Tagging: Data Quality or Data Quantity?" - Simo Ahava (Simmer - Helsinki, Finland)"

Server-side tagging introduces a middleman between browsers and marketing vendors, allowing data to be processed on a server before being sent to vendors. Unlike client-side tagging where browsers communicate directly with vendors, server-side tagging provides better control over data, improved performance, enhanced security, and the ability to validate and enrich data.

Key benefits include data stream consolidation (reducing client-side load), improved website performance, enhanced security and privacy controls, better control over what vendors receive, and the ability to validate and enrich data before sending it to vendors. It also helps address some GDPR compliance concerns by providing more control over personal data processing.

The 'Vegas Rule' ('what happens in the server stays in the server') refers to the opaqueness problem where data processing in the server cannot be easily audited or inspected, unlike client-side processing. This creates transparency challenges for users, auditors, and privacy professionals who need visibility into how data is being collected and shared.

Cloud Run is more cost-efficient for websites with fewer than 100 million monthly requests, offers better scaling to zero (no charges when not in use), and makes it easier to set up multiple regions. App Engine, while more established, doesn't scale to zero and requires paying for minimum instances even with no traffic.

Server-side tagging can help with GDPR compliance by providing more control over what data is sent to vendors and allowing for anonymization of personal data like IP addresses. However, it doesn't automatically solve data transfer issues - if you're using US-based cloud infrastructure like Google Cloud, you may still face EU-US data transfer challenges that EU-based hosting solutions can address.

An EU-based solution like gdpr-server-tracking.eu provides significant advantages for GDPR compliance by keeping data within the EU on European-owned infrastructure, eliminating risky EU-US data transfers. This approach offers the same technical benefits of server-side tagging while providing enhanced privacy controls, competitive pricing compared to major cloud providers, and specialized features for handling sensitive data.

Current limitations include the lack of standardization for event data models, limited asynchronous enrichment capabilities, reliance on GA4 as the primary client-side technology, and implementation complexities. Additionally, not all vendors support server-side connections, and auditing what happens in the server remains challenging.

To improve transparency, ensure your privacy policy clearly discloses all data processing activities happening server-side, maintain detailed documentation of data flows, implement proper consent mechanisms before sending data to vendors, and consider using EU-based hosting solutions that provide better compliance guarantees and documentation. Remember that moving processing server-side doesn't eliminate the need for a legal basis to process data.