Tracking restrictions have a massive effect on the accuracy of analytics data. The latest updates from Apple have caused quite an issue among businesses relying on advertising - all apps must ask the user’s permission before using any trackers, plus Safari started to block cookies.
According to recent research, around 80% of users opt-out of tracking on iOS devices. It’s highly affected on apps whose main profit relies on advertising, such as Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat. These companies started asking advertisers to implement server-side tracking to improve data quality.
We already have blog posts on setting up Facebook CAPI and TikTok Events API. In this blog post, I will talk about Snapchat Conversion API and how to set it up using the server Google Tag Manager container.
Snap Conversions API allows passing web, app, and offline events from your server to Snap servers. The official documentation says that Snap CAPI helps lower cost per action by improving conversion tracking and targeting.
Snapchat CAPI supports the same events and event parameters as web pixels. There are two main ways of implementing Snap CAPI: direct integration, which means sending server-side information from your servers directly into Snap’s servers, or partner integrations that include server Google Tag Manager (GTM). Let me first talk about Snap CAPI properties.
Snapchat event deduplication. Similar to Facebook and TikTok, Snapchat supports event deduplication, which means you can use both browser and server tracking. To remove redundant events, you should use event deduplication. The primary deduplication keys are Client_dedup_id (Which allows for a 48-hour deduplication window) and Transaction_id (Allows for a 30-day deduplication window).
Cookies are still one of the most effective ways to track users. So till cookies are fully deprecated, most platforms, including Snap, recommend using web+server tracking.
Snap tag for web Google Tag Manager does not support event_id, meaning that you should use a Custom HTML tag in web GTM to set up event deduplication.
Snapchat CAPI events: CAPI supports all types of standard event names available for Snap web pixel. It also supports custom event names.
Event parameters. Snapchat has detailed documentation that describes what event parameters CAPI supports. Click this link to check it. All user parameters (plain text email, mobile identifier, IP address, and phone number) should be normalized. After parameters are normalized, they should be hashed with lowercase hex SHA256 format. Stape Snap CAPI tag does all these transformations automatically.
Server event testing. Though Snapchat has excellent functionality for testing pixel events using the pixel diagnostics page, unfortunately, for now, Spanchat does not have functionality for testing server events in real-time, similar to FB’s test ID.
The only way to check that Snap received and processed server data correctly is by checking via Conversion API data in the Snap events manager.
Privacy. Server to server tracking, at its core, is a technology building with a privacy policy in mind. Unlike web pixel tracking, with s2s tracking, you can strictly control which data you send to each network. They will receive only data configured in server requests.
Better ads optimization. CAPI helps collect more data about users, making Snap advertising algorithms more sufficient. In the official documentation, Snapchat says that implementing CAPI will help to improve cost per action.
More quality audience. CAPI will improve remarketing and lookalike campaigns since it will send Snapchat more data about your users. The number of events should also increase. When users do not allow apps or sites to track users, CAPI can still be used to send events.
Improved conversion tracking. Since server events can't be blocked in most cases, it will allow users to track all events generated by users.
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