Question from Reddit user:
I’ve been speaking with a few Google Ads experts, and about half are telling me I don’t need server-side tracking and the other half are saying it’s crucial.
Thoughts?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Whether server-side tracking is crucial for Google Ads depends entirely on your business’s conversion volume, reliance on paid media, and tolerance for data loss, but in today’s privacy-focused environment, the experts who say it is crucial are offering the more future-proof advice.
While client-side tracking works for basic measurement, it is no longer sufficient for maximizing campaign performance because client-side methods are prone to data loss caused by ad blockers, Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in browsers like Safari, and strict cookie consent policies.
Server-side tracking directly addresses this data loss, leading to a more complete and accurate view of conversions, which directly improves Google’s ability to optimize your bids using the Google Ads API for uploading the corrected conversion data.
The long answer is:
The reason you are getting split advice is that both sides are technically correct under different circumstances.
Client-side tracking using the Google Tag Manager (GTM) web container still works to fire the Google Ads conversion tag and collect the Google Click ID (gclid), and for smaller accounts or those less dependent on highly accurate measurement, this is often “good enough.”
However, the significant shift toward privacy, especially Apple’s ITP and the increasing popularity of ad blockers, means that a substantial portion of your conversion data, often 10% to 30% or more, is simply never reported using this client-side method.
This lost data has a direct, negative impact on your Google Ads performance because the algorithm can’t see the full value of a user and therefore cannot optimize your bidding strategy effectively.
Server-side tracking, facilitated by a GTM Server Container hosted on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, is the necessary solution to mitigate this loss.
With a server-side setup, the GTM web container on your site first sends the user’s click and session data, including the $$gclid$$, to your own secure server, not directly to Google.
Since this is a first-party data collection point, it is much less likely to be blocked by ad blockers or browsers.
Your server then uses the Google Ads API to send the conversion event directly to Google’s server.
This is a superior method because it allows you to clean, enrich, and correct the data before it is reported, resulting in a much higher rate of successful conversion measurement.
For instance, if a user’s browser blocks the client-side tag for the purchase event, the server-side container can still capture that conversion from your back-end system (via a webhook or an API call from your CRM/e-commerce platform) and report it to Google Ads via the API.
This comprehensive, reliable conversion data is crucial for the Google Ads system to accurately calculate return on ad spend (ROAS) and make smarter, more profitable automated bidding decisions, making server-side tracking a necessity for serious performance marketing.
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