Server-Side Tracking: When It's Mandatory and When It's Overkill

Required when

You spend $10k+/month on paid media. iOS 17 and cookie loss are costing you measurable conversion signal. You have the engineering resources to maintain it.

Overkill when

Ad spend under $5k/month, no heavy iOS conversion tracking dependency, and limited engineering resources. Client-side GTM is probably fine.

Implementation partners

Stape, the hosted server-side GTM option, is the 80/20 path. Self-hosted GCP container is a path for larger orgs. DIY is rarely the right answer.

What it actually recovers

15–40% of conversions that were being lost. If your conversion volume is low, 15% of little is still little. If it's large, the ROI is obvious.