How the heck do you know which server side tracking is right for you...

After spending 7 years as an engineer at Meta and now building a server-side tracking company, I've learned a thing or two about what actually works, why it works and what’s a fluke.

I’m going to break down how to choose the right server-side tracking solution so you know what you’re getting – or how to build your own if that’s what you’re in the market for!

First, Why Should You Care?

Server-side tracking has three main goals:

• It helps your ads perform better by feeding the algorithms higher quality data

• It helps you get more revenue out of your email flows by adding anywhere from 10-40% customer profiles that you would have otherwise missed – thanks to third-party cookie deprecation

• It extends your cookie retention beyond Safari's strict 7-day limit, letting you collect more first-party customer data – and the cycle continues…

What to Look For: The Key Features That Matter

You want your solution to cover as many edge cases as possible. This is a foolproof way to ensure that you are maximizing your ‘data coverage’. Meaning you are collecting as much accurate data as possible, then piping this information over to your ads/email platforms.

1. Native Infrastructure Integration

Look for solutions that listen to both webhook and webpixel events at the infrastructure level. For example, if you’re a Shopify store, this means not just placing pixels on your thank you, product, and checkout pages – which used to be the popular practice.

The combination of the webpixel + webhook data sources = 100% complete conversion tracking, including any conversion activity that happens outside of your site like manually drafted orders, Facebook Shop, POS, etc.

I’ve learned that this approach hits nearly 100% accuracy.

2. One-Click Installation vs GTM Scripts

Here's a hot take: Choose one-click installation over copying and pasting scripts into Google Tag Manager.

Why?

• Most people mess up GTM configurations (I've seen this too many times!)

• One-click install basically guarantees correct setup

• Your site loads 2-3 seconds faster since you're not loading pixels page by page

3. First Party Cookie Extension (Ideally to 1 year)

Your tracking solution should extend cookie storage to 1 year instead of Safari's 7-day limit.

Safari deletes all stored information on the site, if the user has not interacted with the site in the last 7 days. So without first-party cookies and server-side tracking:

Extending your first-party cookies to 1 year solves this. This is also how you’d be able to automatically add 10-40% more customer profiles to your email flows!

4. The Express Checkout Challenge

Here's something most people miss: When customers use Shop Pay or PayPal, their purchase journey jumps to a different URL for checkout. This breaks traditional tracking because you lose context about where the purchase came from.

Make sure your solution can handle this edge case - very few do!

5. Cross-Device User Tracking

Imagine a very common scenario when a user sees your email on their phone, then open up their laptop to make the purchase on a different browser.

This creates a cross-device situation, even though they’re the same user.

Your solution needs to stitch user profiles across devices as long as they’re clicking the same email, or the same FB or Google ad.

As you can see here are just 5 of some pretty common scenarios that you’ll come across as a brand.

My point is the devil’s in the details of capturing as many of these edge cases as possible to track accurate first-party customer data. Think of a server side solution as a way to maximize this data coverage.

This is how you should evaluate your pixel if you’re trying to decide how to choose one. Anyways, that’s it for now!

✌️Here to help you win,

Yiqi