from Hacker News

What is server-side conversion tracking?

by marketingtech on 8/25/21, 8:04 PM with 60 comments

  • by extr on 8/25/21, 10:06 PM

    I don't know how this shit works. But earlier this month I was showing my girlfriend a Halloween costume I googled on my phone. I visited the website for maybe 10 seconds, I did not log in or create an account. A few days later I got an email from PayPal offering me a $5 coupon for that website. WTFFFF. It made me want to go full-nuclear on the privacy front.
  • by marketingtech on 8/26/21, 2:01 AM

    For those who are referencing tracking pixels and say this isn't anything new, it's important to understand that this is the next evolution of that technology as a result of government regulations around privacy and browser/OS ecosystem changes from Google, Apple, and Mozilla. This data transfer won't occur at the browser layer for much longer - it won't be as technically feasible without cookies and it may not be legal given consent/opt-out requirements. Instead the data will pass directly from the advertiser's server to the ad platform's server. Of course this tech has existed for a long time - it's a basic API call - but it hasn't been widely adopted in the ad tech industry, while millions of websites are using tracking pixels.

    It is not a 1:1 replacement for tracking pixels and lacks some of those creepy features (you're unlikely to get tagged if you simply browse a website without giving up any personal info), but it offers new ones as well (the ability to send arbitrary data to an ad platform).

  • by edoceo on 8/25/21, 10:05 PM

    Oh, I remember this, from like 2000 (in CGI/Perl). Did it this way for ages then there was this ground-breaking company for ads called "DoubleClick" (I think) that did it all with cookies and js. Wonder whatever happened to them.
  • by scott00 on 8/26/21, 12:42 AM

    How in the world does this satisfy the advertisers? They send the personal identifying details of each customer to Google/FB, and then Google/FB tells them "oh yeah, that guy totally saw an ad"? The ad giants would never lie about such a thing... they will just fix all of the bugs that under report and just not have the time to get to all of those pesky over-reporting bugs.
  • by dillondoyle on 8/26/21, 3:25 AM

    I have this setup for our clients on FB.

    The reported ROAS is all over the place on FB right now. It goes from previously 1 = 100% return on investment. Now it sometimes says 10X numbers like 70, which I assume is of the data they could measure 70% roi.

    It seems to 'automagically' combine the offline conversion data with standard FBQ but I have no idea the match rates for the server-server data I send in and also importantly if it de-dupes.

    I've tried to experiment with voting data in the past, I want to try that more this election. Run get out the vote ads and optimize for actual early votes.

  • by phibz on 8/25/21, 10:12 PM

    This is nothing new. We were sharing impression data with client partners from the server side years ago.
  • by pjmlp on 8/26/21, 10:44 AM

    It is another example how Web apps are apparently more secure than native ones.
  • by majormajor on 8/26/21, 2:32 AM

    > “The server-side option was built as part of our ongoing work to give advertisers more control over their users’ data,” said a Google spokesperson

    Wait. Whose data is it, Google?

  • by tsjq on 8/26/21, 3:14 AM

    does blocking 3rd party cookies suffice to get rid of this ?