Duga Digital’s success story appears as part of our Partner Spotlight series.
Oxford Online Pharmacy (OOP) is a family business going back three generations to 1925. Employing experienced pharmacists and healthcare professionals, OOP is committed to translating the values and heritage of the Oxfordshire-based bricks and mortar chemists, online.
The challenge
Recognizing the diminishing volume of data provided by third-party tracking, Duga Digital advised server-side data collection as a positive tactical move to support data accuracy. This approach significantly enhances the user experience by creating lighter web pages with less JavaScript, resulting in faster load times. Additionally, fewer cookies are set, making them easier to manage. The cookies set by the server are also more secure, ensuring better privacy protection.
OOP had several questions about transitioning to server-side Piwik PRO data collection. The most important ones were:
- What will it cost?
- What are the benefits?
OOP faced both technical and non-technical challenges in this program of work. From a technical perspective, there is often a steep learning curve with the deployment of infrastructure.
The challenges were addressed and supported during the parallel data collection period with a robust change management process and a self-serve reporting dashboard. To ensure the business had confidence in the value of the changes, accurate and trustworthy data was essential. The most accurate measurement requires the most accurate technical approach. The project methodology was clear from the beginning with complete change transparency and a concrete schedule that integrated into the normal business processes.
Collecting parallel streams of data provided valuable insights into how the data volume and quality changed with the server-side collection. The reporting dashboard made it easy to track these changes and understand their impact on the business. It also was a vital tool for giving OOP control over the process and providing immediate answers to many questions, including unexpected ones, such as:
- Why are there fewer sessions?
- How does this affect my ecommerce reporting?
- Does this affect channel attribution?
- How soon can I use this data to power my audiences?
The solution
Oxford Online Pharmacy chose to engage Duga Digital to support the implementation of server-side Piwik PRO on the website.
Oxford Online Pharmacy had some specific requirements:
- There is no client-side tag management system in place.
- Inline script is used to deploy tags.
- Data is collected in both Google Analytics (GA4) and Piwik PRO.
- Piwik PRO is the primary data source for ecommerce analysis.
- GA4 is used for context – a comparison point to add further context to the improvements delivered by server-side data collection.
Our approach to server-side migration is to run client-side and server-side in parallel for an agreed number of business cycles. This provides a body of data for calibration, answering the key technical and business questions related to:
- Quantified data volume changes
- Clear data quality improvements
- Audited costs
Piwik PRO would process both client-side and server-side data in one property. Segments easily enabled the comparison of the two data sets.
Additionally, two web data streams fed one GA4 property. All of them were subject to the same consent constraints, ensuring privacy compliance.
Duga Digital has a strong track record deploying server-side GA4 and Piwik PRO (and we’ve blogged about it). Our agency supported Oxford Online Pharmacy in the setup of a standard server-side Google Tag Manager (GTM) container on Cloud Run. Guided through the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) setup steps, the metrics.oxfordonlinephramacy.co.uk subdomain resolved to the GCP load balancer – the server-side container was ready.
A simple modification added metadata to the server-generated hits to aid reporting on the datasets. The analytics pings sent from the server-side GTM container are decorated with the server-side GTM container ID and version numbers:
These values are present in both GA4 and Piwik PRO reporting to enable segmentation of data.
Reporting
The data stream name provided an easy parameter to apply in a pair of comparisons – one for client-side only data, one for server-side.
At the same time, a pair of segments provided a convenient solution for Piwik PRO reporting:
The results
Over the first two weeks, the server-side data collection data volume was 15% greater than the client-side data. This was in line with expectations; however, fewer users were reported.
Curious. Why is that? And is that expected?
Yes, that’s also quite normal. The first-party cookies used in server-side data collection are different to ‘normal’ analytics cookies. Any third party can read first-party cookies when they’re set by JavaScript. This is how analytics cookies have been set in the past, and this is why browsers delete them to protect user privacy.
This means users are ‘forgotten’. If their analytics cookie is deleted, the next time they come back to the site, they appear to be a brand new user. This inflates client-side user reporting. The server-side user count is a truer reflection of reality as server-side cookies can only be read by the first-party – hence, browsers are less likely to delete them, and users are remembered better.
This also means you will see more engaged users, reported as being engaged for longer, consuming more pages – this is an expected data quality improvement.
It gets better still: as more transactions are observed, with fewer users, you see an effective conversion rate increase, and an increase in revenue per user.
After the trial period, the business had sufficient confidence in the data collected by the updated infrastructure. The combination of data sources provided the necessary insights to confirm that the data volume and data quality had changed sufficiently to merit a permanent change.
To manage costs, and complexity, the parallel measurement could be removed. The additional context provided by the GA4 data served its purpose, and now OOP can focus on the Piwik PRO data for business as usual (BAU) workloads, and reporting.
The architecture shown here demonstrates the end result with just a single analytics ping being sent to the server where Piwik PRO collects data for the reporting and activation. The minimum amount of tagging is used to deliver maximum value to the business.
This is beneficial to the user in terms of user experience – the site is lighter, and there’s less JavaScript on pages. Fewer cookies are set, making them easier to manage, and they are now set by the server, meaning they’re more secure and privacy is better respected. Using server-side data collection unlocks even more privacy benefits along with the full power of Piwik PRO for data collection, reporting and activation.
Doug Hall
Analytics Director at Duga Digital
Doug has over 25 years of experience in the data and technology field with a personal mission statement: “to inform and to engage”. He is particularly passionate about data strategy, privacy, and ethics, with extensive knowledge and skills in the Google Marketing Platform, public speaking, and vegan cuisine. Doug states he is always eager to learn new things, challenge himself, and collaborate with others who share a vision of making a difference with data. | LinkedIn Profile
About our partner:
Duga Digital provides quality, excellence and unparalleled care in the work they deliver for their customers.
Their specialities lie in digital – mostly in data, but also in the rapidly evolving fields of technology, privacy, governances and regulations. They work with companies all over the world, adding important resources or solutions to help ensure smooth running of business together.
Market:
UK
Industry:
Digital analytics