Finally, you’ve decided to implement Server-Side tracking to collect data about your users and are you wondering what parameters you should send to Google Analytics 4? You should know that in order to process correctly the Server-Side requests to Google Analytics 4 you have to send some mandatory parameters. But first, let’s have a look at the difference between Client-Side vs Server-Side hits sent to Google Analytics 4.
Google Analytics 4 Client-side vs Server-side request. What’s different?
Let’s briefly review why the client-side data sent to Google Analytics 4 is different from the server-side request you do. The main thing to notice is that with the browser we have some values related to your users natively available and automatically collected by your Google Analytics 4 tag. That is unfortunately not always the case if you choose to send traffic to your Analytics property using a custom HTTP request. There are other differences between the two tracking methodologies but in this article, we’ll focus on the Essential parameters to send to Google Analytics 4 in order to not mess up your reports and track in a more reliable way your users
Essential Parameters to use when tracking Pageview events and transactions and why
Just another clarification, these parameters come in handy also in the case of hybrid tracking. Hybrid tracking here means a User Journey tracked both on the Server-side and Client-side. Without further ado lets’ go through this list.
- Google cid: needed to identify the user across his/her journey if this is tracked both with the client and server-side methodologies
- User Agent: This is an important metric to use in order to avoid that your traffic being identified by Google Analytics 4 as bot traffic and ultimately filtered out
- Document parameters: You should send as many parameters related to the document you can to let Google Analytics 4 assign to the right the collected hits. You should not forget to include:
- Document path
- Document title
- Document host name
- Document Location URL
If you intend to track server side some kind of event you should not forget about:
- Event Category
- Event Action
- Event Label
If you intend to track Transactions using Server-Side methodologies you should include all these essential E-commerce parameters:
- Product ID/SKU
- Product price/revenue
- Product name
- Pruct quantity
I’d like to remark here that every implementation has its own particularities and there is no general solution that works for everyone but having these essential parameters should do the trick in most cases. If you’re using Server-Side tracking to collect data about your users and you want to know more about the best practices to use with your Server-tracking implementation contact us and we’ll be pleased to help you to track in the best reliable way your users’ data
