Serverside
Server to server
Server-side tracking allows triggering tags directly on your website(s) and calling them from your servers.
Main benefits of this type of tracking include:
Site performance improvement (tags are no longer called/triggered by the site itself)
Increased security (Commanders Act or partner solutions can no longer interact with the websites, drop cookies, etc…)
Possibility to monitor data collected by Commanders Act and sent to partners.
Server-side tracking operates as follows :
Step 1 : Your servers (clients’ servers) display the webpage a user is browsing and call Commanders Act’s servers simultaneously. Your IT department shares information of your choice with TagCommander through server-side variables (present in the server-side datalayer).
Server-side calls issued by your IT team to Commanders Act look like this :
http://serverside$siteID$.commandersact.com/$containerID$/?variable1=value1&variable2=value2…
$siteID$ and $containerID : Commanders Act site and container identifiers.
variable1, variable2: names of server-side data layer’s variables (ex: ProductID, UserID, Order Amount…)
They are called “incoming hits” or “input hits”.
Step 2: Commanders Act sends the received information to the partners’ servers. These hits are called “outgoing hits” or “output hits”. There are as many outgoing hits as there are partner solutions you wish to send the information to.
Ex: if you wish to call Criteo and Google; a hit will be sent to Criteo’s servers and another one to Google’s.
Hybrid approach
“Hybrid server-side” refers to an implementation method combining browser and server-side technologies.
It consists in retrieving web data (ex: cookies, variables …) and storing it on Commanders Act servers for 24 hours, in order to provide third-party solutions with information present in both the servers and the customer’s Website.
Main benefits:
Enhanced website performance (most tags are no longer called on web pages but on the server-side)
Data that can only be obtained on websites (cookies, certain variables) still can be collected and sent to partner solutions from the servers.
Hybrid server-side operates as follows:
Step 1: a Commanders Act tag present in the web container collects data on the website and stores it on TagCommander servers for 24 hours. A matching key allowing to associate information collected on the website with that present on the servers needs to be defined.
This key thus has to be retrievable both on the website and on the servers (example of reconciliation keys: User ID, Basket ID).
Example: you wish to obtain on your website the order ID and the cookie value of one your partner solutions. Your reconciliation key is the User ID. The Commanders Act tag will collect information in this way:
Reconciliation key (user_id) | order_id | cookie_vendor1 |
123456 | 1234FR | A |
567489 | 34565FR | A |
346658 | 56456FR | B |
… | … | … |
Step 2: Server-side hits sent to partner solutions will be enriched with information collected through web containers. Thank to this reconciliation key, data from the website and the servers correlates.
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