Introduction

Mid August 2020, Into our first article “What is Server-side GTM and why should you care? A very short introduction.” we explained why you should care about the new beta launch. 

Server-side tracking is actually not new. Tealium & Segment were already offering the option. In the past Google was addressing server to server solution with for instance the Measurement Protocol. But now the market leader Google is joining the move for his Tag Management System with their public Beta (free solution while it’s not the case for others). 

Our industry is evolving regarding privacy challenges and towards a “cookieless” world. Tag Management Systems are adapting themselves towards positive enhancements.  

GTM Server-Side (SS) has been a hot topic for the last couple of months now. In this article we will explain what it is and the advantages to understand the buzz.  

Usual way to use GTM 

Before explaining the new Server-Side, let’s understand how the classical “client side” GTM is working.  

1. Your classical GTM is implemented thanks to a container ( Javascript snippet) in the source code of your website. 
2. When the page loads, this GTM container loads as well and fires the tags based on your architecture ( on the illustration below, it’s an analytics tag, conversion and 3rd party tag). Everything is happening client (browser) side. 
3. While firing the tags, they collect data and send it to various servers like GA, Google ads or 3rd party analytics. Together with the tracking code, some additional information about the pages are sent ( like the page, device, etc). 

Illustration from Google Developer guide. 

Server-Side GTM 

By contrast in this configuration, Google Tag Manager container is in a server-side environment (and not client side ). This new server container type resides in Google Cloud environment: Ideally in a custom subdomain in the same domain hierarchy as your website. That way, the request is considered as first party context, which has a significant impact on how cookies are treated. 

The flow is the following:

1. The GTM SS is getting data (into this server container) from his code on the client-side (don’t be surprised to see the term “client-side”here. It still needs to capture the information). The server of GTM SS is on Google Cloud Platform living on a subdomain of your site. (Sidenote: you can also have a direct server to server connection)
2. GTM SS will process the data, manipulate it and then send it to GA for instance.  

Illustration from Google Developer guide. 

Advantages

At this stage you could ask yourself the following question:  “why should we add a step to the data collection process? “. Let’s understand this through the key advantages: 

A. Reduced load on a page

Every web page has to load and process a lot of resources while we know speed on a website is extremely crucial. With the GTM SS, instead of loading all the scripts on your website, it will only load some of them. 

How ? Those scripts would actually send the data to your GTM SS container and process the data & scripts from there. The tags require less work on the browser but shifting this workload to the server instead. Concretely what stays in GTM on your browser has less to process so that the website can run faster. 

Moreover, the unified event format that GTM SS is using enables it to simplify to a single call. 

B. Control what kind of data is sent to vendors

As mentioned earlier, the traditional tags are gathering more data on your website than instructed. They for instance collect information about your device like screen size, page information but also fingerprinting and cookies. 

From a privacy statepoint this can be scary and could lead to leaks of personally identifiable information (PII). 

With GTM SS, you are adding a layer of security. This is completely different from the current dynamic because you own and have full control on the Server-Side environment.  Visitors data are better protected by collecting and distributing data in a server-side environment. The server of GTM operates in your own Google Cloud project and you are the only one to have access to the data until you decide to send it elsewhere. There are no data leaks with third-party cookies or surprise with injected url parameters. 

Let’s give 2 examples: 

• With GTM SS, your Facebook Pixel is communicating only with your cloud server but the visitor’s browser cannot be reached anymore ( client-side). 
• If your GTM SS container is collecting personally identifiable information (PII), you can clean the data there before sending it somewhere else. 

In summary, the tracking requests are sent to your domain and not to a third-party domain. 

Limitations to adoption 

Until now there is only good news but you feel the “Yes but” coming. 

There are indeed two elements that could slow down the adoption: 

1. There are new rules that are asking different skills : digital marketing is becoming more technical. You will also need access to the Server-Side container to debug what is happening inside. 
2. GTM SS is a free tool. But you need to host that Server-Side container for instance on Google Cloud Platform. Stay reinsured this should be reasonable and represent around an hundred euros per month per server. Larger amounts of network traffic could increase this amount.  

Conclusion

The entire industry is shifting towards 1st party data. GTM Server-Side is thus the logical evolution in terms of privacy, data governance but also in quality (speed page enhancement for instance). 

We should all prepare for it but keep in mind that GTM SS is still in Beta and will continue to evolve until the finished version. For instance third party tags are not yet supported but only GA UA or GA4. This means a complete transition is not yet possible and we should keep in parallel the current GTM with the other tags. But seeing the advantages it definitely is the moment to test and consider it. 

Important to remember that GTM SS is facilitating privacy but doesn’t make you GDPR compliant. The consent matters and not the technology used. 

Regarding your knowledge on GTM (client-side), don’t worry it’s not obsolete: GTM SS is still using tag, trigger, variable model but has some novelties added.  

Finally, this shift of processing data to Server-Side is opening the door on endless possibilities...

Want to know more about server-side GTM? Contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we’ll be happy to help out! 

{snippet margauxmarien-en}

The popularity and importance of video has been increasing a lot over the past years, which made it an essential part of the modern-day digital society. As video is a powerful storyteller  that easily unlocks users engagement, a vast majority of businesses now incorporate videos in their marketing strategies. 

Given the popularity of video, Google tries to display them on SERPs whenever possible for certain informational or educational queries. For example, questions that start with ‘What’ or ‘How to’ will frequently be shown on the SERP. However, most websites can rank in the video tab, but it is harder to get ranked in universal search with a video. 

We can predict this trend will only continue to grow, and video will play an even more important role, not only for the user but as a consequence also for Google. Hence, it will be very important to build a solid video SEO strategy to get your videos ranked on the SERPs.

1. Create engaging video content

To create engaging video content, you should first outline your video strategy. Where, when and how will your video be used, and what is its purpose? When you know who will be watching, what you want to accomplish and where it will be seen, you can customize it to fit the platform and your targeted audience. Finally, you can reflect on the actions you want your customer to take after viewing the video, and translate this into a relevant call-to-action. 

A great way to increase the credibility of your video is to include client testimonials. These real-life stories, if outlined and scripted appropriately, can build authentic credibility for your brand. Furthermore, truly authentic video content relies on two things: quality and consistency. Without quality, you lose engagement from viewers who have come to expect high-quality content. Without consistency, you can't create a long-term relationship with your audience. If you have both of those things, the engagement will follow as long as you're providing valuable content your audience wants to consume. Finally, it's important to keep the human factor. 

2. Create compelling thumbnails

A video thumbnail is a still image that represents your video. It’s what your potential viewers will see first on various platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, the Google search results and also your own website. Based upon this thumbnail, users will decide whether to watch your video or not. Therefore, it is important to have a compelling and qualitative thumbnail. This thumbnail should convey the core message of your video in a clear but attractive way. 

3. Video hosting

Video hosting is the practice that allows you to upload and store videos on your own website (self-hosting) or on a third-party website such as YouTube or Vimeo (third-party hosting). Both methods of hosting your video have their own advantages and disadvantages. 

Self-hosting the video on your website makes it easier to get links to your website rather than other websites linking to your video on YouTube, for example. Moreover, from a technical point of view, it is easier to get rich snippets on SERPs when you self host your video. Finally, when the video is hosted on  your own website, the media player is highly customizable, and can be displayed in a higher resolution. The main disadvantage of self hosting your video, is that it might have a lower reach as a lot of video searches happen directly on video hosting platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo. 

The big advantage of third-party hosting is the bigger reach, as most of the video queries happen on these video hosting platforms such as Vimeo or Youtube. In fact, Youtube is the second largest search engine behind Google. Moreover, it is very easy to set-up a profile on these platforms and it is fast. Moreover, there is no need to take into account the extra bandwidth that is needed when you self-host your videos. The blocking point of using third-party hosting is then the cannibalization of most of the traffic to your own website, since most people watching a video on Youtube, will also stay there. 

4. On page video SEO optimizations

On-page video SEO is the strategy to make sure that your page that contains the video gets ranked on search engines pages and relevant keyword queries. In short, it is the process of getting free, organic traffic through search engines to watch your videos. With video becoming a more important part of marketing over the years, and many companies worldwide implementing it on their website, it has become harder to get a good ranking in search results. However, there are some technical tips that are easy to implement to improve the likelihood of your on-page video popping up higher in the search results. 

First, there are the meta title tags. These are the titles that are visible on the top of your browser in the tabs, but they are also displayed as the blue link searchers click on search engines. Enough reasons to make sure that your title tag is as relevant as possible. Therefore, it is recommended to put your most important keywords at first, and to not make it longer than 70 characters (after, titles get truncated). The title of the video should be the main headline of the video and formatted as an H1 tag. 

Next, you also have to take care of the meta descriptions, which describe what your video is about. While it is not directly taken into account by the search engines’ ranking systems, it is nonetheless an important element of metadata, since it ensures a higher click-through rate. Meta descriptions should be no longer than 155 characters, and should function to convince the searcher to watch your video. 

Besides the title and the description, the URL also plays an important role. It is recommended to keep them short and descriptive. Short, because there is a high correlation between the number of characters your URL contains, and your ranking on search engines. Descriptive, because searchers are more likely to click through on a URL when the URL matches their search query. Therefore, it is recommended that your URL includes your target keywords.

Finally, subtitles are crucial. Search engines are not able to watch a video. To understand what the video is about, they ‘crawl’ the text associated with it. There are many ways to add text to improve your video for search engine results, and one of them is subtitles. In addition, subtitles deepen the keyword coverage of your video. Your content can then appear on keywords that don’t appear in tags or titles, but do in subtitles.

5. Structured data and rich snippets

Another way to give more context and information to Google is by using structured data, which is a standardized piece of code that provides more information about a page and classifies the content on the page. By implementing this structured data, Search engines are able to understand better the content of your page and they then use this to display search results in a specific and much richer way. 

When structured data markup is added correctly to the existing site HTML,  rich snippets can be implemented. Rich snippets are a way to expand your snippet with extra information like an image, ratings etc. Rich snippets for video can be used to drive a higher click through rate by adding a description, a title, thumbnail images and URLs and a duration. 

Rich snippets are a way to stand out from the crowd. They are more eye-catching than normal snippets and tend to drive a higher click-through-rate. By implementing rich snippets, you’ll drive more traffic towards your site. Not because of your position that changed, but because more people tend to click on your snippet. In the long run, search engines notice that searchers prefer your page above the other, and your ranking will improve. 

Furthermore, rich results from videos can appear as a featured snippet, which can be seen as an upgrade of rich snippets. Featured snippets have the same characteristics as rich snippets. The only difference is that featured snippets get shown at the top of a SERP. 

Thus, a rich snippet is an enhanced organic search result, while featured snippets are a direct answer to a search query that gets shown at position zero. Keep in mind that it’s not up to you to appear as a featured snippet, but that the search engines themselves decide whether to show a featured snippet, depending on relevancy to the search query. Featured snippets are most likely to show up in search queries containing questions like “What” or “How to”. 

An example of a featured snippet and rich snippet:

On Google, your video can be shown as a featured snippet by marking up your video with VideoObject. Videos with a VideoObject can appear in Google Search results, video search results, Google Images, and Google Discover. 

There are two types of properties in VideoObject: required and recommended properties. If you don't include the required properties, Google may not be able to extract any information about the video. Recommended properties are used to add more information about your content, which could provide a better user experience.

Required properties

Recommended properties

6. XML Video sitemaps

In general, if you have a website, it’s highly recommended that you have a sitemap, which is a structured file that summarises your site hierarchy on page, content and multimedia level. Sitemaps will be important for SEO as they can be easily interpreted by a search engine’s automated crawling robot, helping them to determine the theme of your website and eliminating any crawling errors. Sitemaps ensure all your web content is scanned and the structure of your site is fully and accurately represented.

To further optimize your Video SEO it is best to have a separate additional video sitemap. Creating this video sitemap, is an excellent way to help Google find and understand the video content on your site, especially content that was recently added or that might not otherwise be discovered with the usual crawling mechanisms.  

Video sitemaps contain metadata about each video you have on your site, helping Google to accurately present these videos in search results. The data you place into the video sitemap must match the actual content of the video for Google to use it. Video sitemap metadata includes things like the length of the video, a title and a short description of the video content.

Example of a video xml sitemap:

Conclusion

It is clear that Video is a very important part of modern-digital society and that it will only gain importance in the future. However, it will not be that easy to get your videos ranked on the SERPs. Therefore, you will need to work out a solid video SEO strategy. First, you’ll need to take care of your video content and come up with engaging content that catches the attention of the users. Besides the content, you will also have to think about your video hosting strategy, work on your on page video SEO optimizations, implement structured data and create a XML video sitemap in order to increase the chances of getting your video ranked on the SERPs. 

{snippet lottevranckx-nl}

So let me start by giving a short explanation of what Channable is. In short, it is a product feed management tool but it is so much more than that. You can import your product feed, clean it, add more information to it, filter it through the use of rules and finally export it to a multitude of channels. It can also be used to generate text ads based on your product feed. More information about Channable can be found here.

As you familiarize yourself with the tool and all its functionalities, sometimes you will get an error. These can prevent your feeds to properly load into Channable or make it so certain ads won’t get uploaded to the proper platforms. In this article we will look specifically into errors that can occur with your upload into Channable as well as problems with your export feed into different platforms. For errors that occur in your text ad generation, take a look at this article.

Import problems

Let’s first look at problems you can have with your import.
A first problem, which is also very easy to resolve, is a wrong XML link, a Google sheet that isn’t made publicly available, etc. Any problem that is similar to this can be solved by updating your XML link, publishing your sheet. This will make it possible for Channable to fetch the feed information. 

A second problem that can occur here is a little less obvious. You can set Channable to update daily, hourly or variations of these. If it is set up that Channable updates the import feed at the same time that it is done internally 1 of 3 things can happen. Either Channable will give an error message that it can’t fetch the feed, it will fetch an empty feed or it will fetch the feed of the day before. While the latter isn’t a real problem, the former can cause problems. These can be fixed by manually fetching the feed again and making sure that the time of fetching the feed is after the update happens internally.

Feed errors

In your export feed, there are a number of errors that can occur. These are categorized as following: Mandatory, Recommended and optional. As logic dictates the Mandatory errors need to be addressed in order to correctly export your product feed to the platform of your choosing. Recommended are advised but not needed and usually will be fields that add additional information for the Google or Microsoft Merchant center but these missing or incorrect values can negatively affect your positioning on those platforms. Optional values will give additional information but are not required nor will they affect positioning in the platform.

While these errors are categorized, the type of error can be the same over the different categories. As in the image above we can see the ‘contains values that are empty’-error multiple times. Depending on the category of the error this will need to be addressed. First of all you will need to identify the products that are affected, this can be done by clicking on the error. If the field is a general one, such as size or color, these can be easily resolved by making a rule for them. This can be a simple filling rule to fill the field with the same value for all products or a search rule if the information is in the description of your product. An example is shown below.

If the value is more unique such as a description or sales price, you can add this field to your import feed or combine feeds to add these values to the corresponding items. If you choose to combine imports you will need a unique identifier to match the value to the right items. This unique identifier will need to be the same in both feeds. 

Another error can be that the fields are not connected to an internal field. This can be easily solved in the finalizing stage of setting up the export feed. You will need to take the corresponding field in the channable feed and map it to the corresponding field needed for the export feed. If needed you can also create an additional field in your set-up to match this field.

The next error to discuss is ‘value not allowed’, some fields that will be exported have to have certain values to be accepted by the platform. In the Finalize step you can find the accepted values for these fields and make rules to add these values to your products or replace them with the allowed values.

When values are not unique and they are expected to be, such as an id number, there are 2 possible solutions. If you only need one of these values and don’t mind losing the information of items with the same identifier you can use a deduplicate rule. If you want to maintain all your products you will have to change the unique identifiers in your import.

Lastly we have an ‘invalid GTIN/EAN code’ - error. These are specific codes that have to be formed in a specific way to conform. For this error there are 2 options: you can exclude and delete all items with invalid codes or you can make sure that the items that are missing the code are provided with the correct code. This can be done by combining import feeds or updating your import feed.

{snippet sanderplacke-en}

Channable is a feed management tool in which you can create, optimize and export your feed across a multitude of comparison websites, affiliate platforms and marketplaces. But let’s dive deeper into their offering and see what it is all about.
To start using Channable you’ll have to first create an import. This can be done by linking Channable to either a XML, CSV, TXT, JSON or Google sheet file. After this step you’ll have to link the imported fields of the chosen file to internal Channable fields. After this is done successfully, you can start using Channable to its fullest.

Data Cleaning

After you imported your feed, the first thing that needs to happen is cleaning all your data. This is made very convenient by the master rules section. Here you will be able to change values of specific fields, add values to them, search and replace text or words. This will allow you to change your feed to fit your needs. Important to note is that these master rules are the first changes that will be made to your feed before you can export them. So only add the bare necessities for cleaning. On the export level and in the PPC tool you can add more rules on top to meet the specific requirements that are needed for that export. So now let’s dive into these other functions.

Product feed manager

Their main product is ofcourse their product feed management tool. This allows you to link your import directly to a number of channels ranging from Awin to Facebook and Google (over 280 options depending on country). First you’ll have the Categorization step that depending on the channel will help you attach the right categorization to your products that is needed for the channel e.g. Google categories for shopping products. Next you can apply rules to the feed to exclude items, add additional attributes, and much more. Lastly you need to link your internal Channable fields (attributes) to the correct channel fields which can be mandatory, recommended or optional. If this is all done, your feed will be exported to the right channel. There is even a Quality check that will allow you to easily check which products are lacking certain attributes which you can then fix in the rules section. A Preview of the output can also be viewed. This can make optimizing your feed much easier as you can make changes in bulk through the rules section instead of having to adapt your feed manually one item at a time. Furthermore, you can set Channable to update daily or hourly and any option in between.

This has also been expanded with API-connections and offers the connection to several online marketplaces such as Amazon or Ebay. This is set-up in the same way as a feed but with some small distinctions. Instead of the Finalize phase where you link fields, there is the attribute builder. It will highlight all the needed attributes for the specific marketplace and with rules you can update/adapt your feed to comply with the needed information. Another advantage of the API connection is that your stock information can be updated in real-time when sales are made on the marketplace. Channable can also retrieve the orders from the ecommerce marketplace and send the order straight to your own online shop (if the connection is made between your own ecommerce platform and Channable). Your shipment and tracking information can then also be automatically sent to the marketplace.

PPC tool

The other big part of Channable is the PPC tool which allows you to easily make Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising ads with dynamic variables based on the feeds to make personalized ads for your entire product feed. Once you link Channable to the correct advertising account you can quickly set-up ETAs, RSAs, sitelinks and price extensions (Only ETA’s accepted for Microsoft Ads for now). These can be set-up with dynamic fields so they create a more personalized ad for each brand, product set or even product depending on your rules. So to start off, you will have to create a campaign. Here you can also add targeting on countries and languages. Then comes ad groups, where you can add specific rules for each ad group generator that you build. These generators will generate a multitude of ad groups based on your feed. In the generators, you can add ad templates for ETAs and RSAs. Further you can add keywords and negative keywords to each ad group that gets generated this way. Lastly you can add sitelinks, price extensions and even manual tracking. As with the feed, you have a preview in the end where you can view the campaign(s), ad groups and ads that have been created as well as any errors that would prevent Channable to push it into the online platform.

Integrated Analytics

After setting up all the necessary feeds, APIs and text ads you want to know how they are performing. You could go into all the different platforms to check up on performances but Channable offers an easier solution. You can link your Google Analytics directly with your project in Channable. For this you will need to create a specific Google Analytics view. With this data in the platform, you can look at performances on an individual product level. This isn’t something you couldn’t do in Google Analytics but with Channable you can use these metrics such as conversion rate, bounce rate or revenue to make specific rules. This can range from adding labels to top selling products to excluding products from the feeds if they are underperforming. This way, you can further customize your exports and optimize your campaigns. By adding the link with Google Analytics you will also have a dashboard that keeps track of the most important metric per channel. This all gives an added layer of actionability and that straight in the platform. 

Channable is a versatile tool that makes it a lot easier to have a feed and export it to a multitude of other platforms. This all through only 1 tool and with the added bonus that you can further complement all the export feeds with not only text ads but also actionable insight you can gain through the Google Analytics numbers.

{snippet sanderplacke-en}