How Server-Side Tracking Powered Ecooking's Growth and Improved Ad Campaign Performance

Overcoming Google Ads Challenges with Improved Tracking

Ecooking, founded in 2016, offers premium skincare and makeup products both in retail and online. While email campaigns drive the majority of their revenue thanks to a loyal customer base, Google Ads and Facebook Ads are essential for expanding brand awareness and acquiring new customers. However, Google Ads faced challenges with high competition and rising click costs, limiting campaign profitability. Scaling was difficult as Smart Shopping campaigns didn’t deliver the desired results.

To tackle these issues, Ecooking partnered with Obsidian Digital, a digital agency focused on performance marketing. One of the key challenges was improving the tracking setup for Google Ads to ensure more accurate data collection. While Facebook had already implemented server-side tracking via Conversions API Gateway, Google Ads was still using client-side tracking, which wasn't as reliable. Fortunately, Ecooking's CMS, Shopware, provided the necessary dataLayer parameters to easily transition to a more robust tracking setup.

Obsidian Digital set up a server-side Google Tag Manager (GTM) account using Stape.io, enabling server-side tracking for both Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads. Tags were also prepared for Klaviyo in anticipation of Ecooking's CRM system change. The entire process, from configuring subdomains to enabling first-party cookies and deploying the new setup, took around 10 hours.

Implementing Server-Side Tracking to Extend Conversion Windows

The main challenge was the limited conversion window with client-side tracking, which only provided data for up to 24 hours. By implementing server-side tracking, Ecooking was able to extend the conversion window, capturing more comprehensive and accurate data. This upgrade was crucial for scaling their campaigns, especially in a competitive industry where precise data is key to optimizing ad spend and profitability.

Scaling Campaigns and Unlocking Growth with Enhanced Tracking

After running both client-side and server-side tracking in parallel for 30 days, the results were compelling:

With these results, Ecooking was able to optimize and scale their previously underperforming campaigns, unlocking new growth opportunities. Server-side tracking empowered Ecooking to measure and scale campaigns that had previously appeared unprofitable, thus enabling further business expansion through digital marketing.