Nemlig goes above and beyond to serve its shoppers. As Denmark’s leading online grocer and second largest e-commerce shop, the company saves shoppers on average 14 days a year in shopping time by providing relevant product recommendations and delivery services. The team is constantly fine-tuning its systems and analytics tools to offer customers a more personalized shopping experience. “In order to provide a personalized shopping experience we need to have high-quality data,” says Martin Madsen, Nemlig’s Head of Web and App Analytics.
Martin’s team gathers and delivers consumer insights to all parts of the business, but gaps in reporting prevented them from better understanding and serving their users. For example, the team noticed that its reporting was missing transactions from high revenue customers due to gaps in their measurement infrastructure. As they looked for a way to gather more information, they needed to make sure that any new processes were aligned with GDPR data-handling regulations and the European Union's e-privacy directive.
On top of this, as countries around the world implemented stay-at-home orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, more consumers turned to online shopping and home delivery for their essentials. Nemlig saw a large increase in visitors to their site, which resulted in a longer page-load time, which negatively impacted conversion rates on the site.
Martin’s team searched for a solution to help them accurately report on customer insights from their website and maintain a speedy shopping experience. To gather more accurate details on user behavior in a privacy-safe way, the team turned to Google’s Consent Mode and Server-Side Tagging in Google Tag Manager 360.
Finding a server-side solution with Tag Manager 360
Nemlig partnered with IIH Nordic, a digital marketing agency that would help Nemlig enhance site security and performance. Together, the teams decided to start utilizing a server-side solution for Nemlig’s entire website. In a client-side implementation, a user’s browser sends data directly to its final destination. But by adopting a server-side implementation, Nemlig can remove tags from the browser and place them into their secure server, keeping just one single Google tag on the page to handle data collection. Once the data is in Nemlig’s server – which only Nemlig has access to – the server acts as a staging area where Nemlig can first choose what data should be sent to their analytics and advertising systems.
Moving to a server-side solution also meant establishing total anonymity for the user. “With Server-Side Tagging, you can strip all of the personally identifiable information from users’ sessions before sending data to our analytics and advertising systems,” says Martin. “Privacy was one of the main reasons we pushed forward on the project.”
Because Nemlig was already using Tag Manager 360, and hosting their data in Google Cloud, they decided to adopt Server-Side Tagging in Tag Manager 360. “The improved data quality and direct link to Google Cloud products was a key reason we chose this solution,” says Martin. Instead of sending eight or ten different data streams to its Google Cloud server, Nemlig could now bundle one “add to cart” event and send those insights to their server as a single unit. This enabled Nemlig to capture valuable conversion events that it previously was not able to to measure due to excessive event volumes. Because of the shift of some tags from the browser to the server, Nemlig was able to provide customers with a faster, smoother shopping experience, with page load speed tests showing a 7% performance improvement.
Combining Server-Side Tagging with Consent Mode
Because Nemlig operates in the European Economic Area, where website tags must adjust according to users’ cookie consent choices, they also implemented Consent Mode. Because Server-Side Tagging natively supports Consent Mode, this meant that the Google tags in Nemlig’s server container automatically updated to respect the consent choice from the user.
For users who consent to usage of cookies, tags from Google are able to set cookies which provides Nemlig with the opportunity to understand if users had previously visited the website. For users who deny consent to cookies, tags from Google update to not use any cookies in reporting.
With Consent Mode, you can update Google tag behavior based on the user consent selection.
By using Consent Mode and Server-Side Tagging together, Nemlig was able to ensure privacy compliance while also accurately measuring all website traffic.
Growing conversions and sharing insights
After implementation, Nemlig noticed that the 90-day conversion for new customers grew by more than 40%. Nemlig’s analytics are now much more trustworthy, with online reported orders more accurately reflecting registered orders on Nemlig’s backend system.
Privacy is the foundation upon which Nemlig builds all their new features. Using first-party data, while respecting user cookie consent, has proven to offer an elevated user experience. As Martin and his team share these higher-quality insights with other departments, the business can move faster toward its goal — providing the ultimate, hyper-personalized experience for all shoppers across Denmark.
