What is Client-Side tracking?

Client-side tracking is the type of tracking that you probably encounter sporadically in your daily life. You may regularly navigate to your website's Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel and see how your visitors have interacted with your website. 

Technically, client-side is the various things that happen on the user's device and in their internet browser when they visit your website. This means that all the information that comes into your various analysis and marketing tools is data that comes directly from your visitors' device/browser. 

Most often, the website's client-side tracking is set up using Google Tag Manager, which is connected to one's website and can thus send events to, for example, Google Analytics.

What is Server-Side tracking?

Server-side tracking has been on all marketers' to-do list of things they had to deal with for a good while, but is often something that gets downgraded in busy everyday life.

Server-side tracking is the way in which the various systems get information from. On the client side, this information typically comes from the visitor's browser, but with server-side tracking, it is information that is sent directly from the website's server to the various analysis and marketing tools.

Technically, a server-side tracking setup most often consists of one's normal client-side setup using e.g. Google Tag Manager. To support this, we set up the same events server-side. In this way, we make reservations that it is not always that the visitor's browser/client side sends the completely correct information. 

Among other things, it may be that the visitor users a so- called adblocker, which blooks websites from tracking the person's behaviour, or browsers that use Intelligent. Tracking protection (ITP), ETP or similar technology. It may also be that there is some  whatsapp data given error in the browser, which means that google tag manager is not loaded correctly and thus does not send data to the client side of your systems.

By setting up server-side tracking, you will potentially find that you get even more data into your systems, because you get the visitors who do not send client-side data into your tools.

If you want to learn more about ITP, you can watch our webinar on the subject here.

Feed optimization for Google Shopping: Google Product Category

If you work with advertising on Google Shopping, you probably already know that it is important to optimize your product feed.

In this article, we will talk about a very specific form of feed optimization, namely mapping and adding the Google Product Category to your feed.

But what if I've already set up my product categories?

If the above is your first thought, then I can tell you that even if you have defined your product categories in your shop and your feed, there is still more work for you to tackle.

Lots of work indeed.

And after this blog post, you should be ready to go.

Have fun!

Take advantage of Google's category system and be displayed in relevant searches
Your product categories are important because they help Google understand exactly what it is you're selling. Google Product Category is Google's own category system, also known as their taxonomy. There is a taxonomy for each country, and you can find the full Danish list here . To make the categorization simpler and easier to use, Google has automated that part of the feed, which means that the next optimization tips are very simple – even if you have a large product catalog. 

Ultimately, this means that you make it easier for Google to show your products in relevant searches. At the same time, you outperform your competitors in an area where they probably didn't think that there could even be competition for places. You can already do a lot by optimizing your titles and descriptions, but this simple optimization, where Google has done most of the work already, makes your feed even better. 

Okay. Smart. How do you do that?

To begin with, try to make your product categories in your feed as optimal and specific as possible. If you e.g. sell toys, it is not enough that all your products are under the same "Toys" product category in your feed - or in your shop for that matter. You probably sell both teddy bears, dolls, toy cars and balls, where they all have different properties, are for different age groups, etc. Therefore, it is not beneficial for your feed and your Google Shopping ads that everything is in the same product category. 

For example, your product categories could look like this:

Baby toys > Bricks
Teddy bears > Dog teddy bears
Dolls > Barbie dolls
If your product categories are already fairly well under control, i.e. your "g:product_type" division, we are well on the way to being able to map it correctly into Google's own product category taxonomy.

For our part, we do all our feed optimizations in Data Feed Watch

Under your Google Shopping channel and under Mapping there will be three steps in your feed processing. “Map Fields”, which are required, and “Include/Exclude Products” and “Categorize Products”, which are optional. We have to work in the third step: "Categorize Products". 

In this step, you have the option of auto-generating rules or adding rules manually. We recommend that you create the rules manually, as not all exceptions or variations of a product are caught by the automatic mapping. 

In practice, it's very simple: You add a category where you find exactly the taxonomy you want to map against, and make rules for which products can be placed in that Google product category. When we worked with Lampeguru , we worked a lot on mapping our products to the Google product categories, and we ended up with 15 very specific categorizations, since everything was not just 'lamps'.

We were able to map so specifically that we were able to categorize products for e.g. 'emergency lighting', 'weather stations', 'holiday decorations' and 'night lights', just to name a few. It just takes a little time and creative thinking to find the correct taxonomy that fits your product categories. If you can't granular down quite that specifically, it's always better to just pick a taxonomy that fits – eg. “Toys and games > Toys”.

As a starting point, it should be enough that you have given your products the correct product categories in the raw feed and possibly also worked with these categories in Data Feed Watch to ensure that you have all the relevant products in the correct product categories.

Continuing with our toy store example

We've found a taxonomy that fits baby stacking toys that we can use for our 'bricks' category. Then you can create a rule that looks like this, for example:

If not all products are correctly connected to the relevant product category, you can create rules that also look for relevant words in the titles. It can for example, be a good idea of you've got new products that have't been mapped correctly, or if there isn't a for this  product category specifically type of item in your raw feed. We recommend that you use title and not description for this type of mapping, as you can mention other product types in your describtion that are relevant to your products, but which do not characterize it.