Website visitor behavior tracking technology via cookies has been widely used in the world of online paid advertising for years, be it on social media platforms or in search engines.
This technology relies on the web browsers that visitors to a website or online store use to track their behavior, including: the pages they visit, the purchases they make, and data records, hence the name (browser tracking).
When you install a tracking pixel code for an ad platform on your website, eg: Snapchat Pixel, it uses the same technology to track visitor behavior and send their visit data to your ad account on that site so you can build a custom audience for them and realign them with other ads.
However, this traditional method of tracking is currently facing significant challenges, including directing web browsers to place more restrictions on the cookies that web beacons use to track the behavior of website visitors.
In addition to raising awareness and partial resort to hidden browsing functions or installing ad blockers, which in turn stop the functionality of the tracking code of advertising platforms and web analytics platforms.
Because of these challenges, a new tracking technology called Conversion API (commonly known as CAPI) works differently from traditional tracking methods, because it relies on hosting servers to track data about website visitors, rather than a web browser and is therefore called server-side tracking.
The practical idea of CAPI is to obtain data from the visitor before the browser loads the content of the page of the website he visits, that is, h. The page download request from the site goes directly to the hosting server to get its data.
The technology can be likened to a bridge that allows site visitor data to flow outside the confines of a web browser, with restrictions on its cookies, and an ad blocker whose function is limited to stopping malicious code from running after content has been downloaded. Site pages track and appear in your browser.
It provides advertising platforms such as: Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. (CAPI) that can link to websites and online stores and generate trackable events, such as: B: Visiting pages, making purchases, and placing them in the shopping cart.
(CAPI) is a more accurate tracking method than pixels in advertising platforms, but is currently used with pixels as a backup method for website tracking event data. It tracks event data that the pixel can't see, and then sends it to the event handler in your ad account.
To install (CAPI), you must use a cloud hosting platform such as B: Google Cloud Platform to create a dedicated server, or a platform that provides cross-server tracking services such as B: (Stape) Platform and Google Tag Manager create a dedicated container for tracking in the Platform Manager for multiple servers .
By installing CAPI on your website or online store, ad serving systems will get more accurate data about visitors and buyers and will help reduce the amount of data lost due to data restrictions, browser privacy or ad blockers at the pixel level.