using Tealium's Webhook connector to offload pixels from your website

[Frish]

Hi! On the following page: https://community.tealiumiq.com/t5/Universal-Data-Hub/Tealium-Collect-Tag-Setup-Guide/ta-p/11923 I saw this claim:

• Reduce pixel requests
  With the Collect tag, you can use Tealium's Webhook connector to offload pixels from your website.

As we use many pixels on our website -- and I am actively looking for ways to optimise this -- I'm keen to know more about this. As I was unable to find any documentation or examples, I was wondering if someone might please demonstrate this for me please!

I'm curious about the benefits of this practice when using multiple vendors' pixels, and a working example I might tailor to my own purposes.

[ruipedromachado · Accepted solution]

Hi @Frish

So in short, the idea is to migrate the pixels on the site (client side) to the cloud (server side).

There are some things to consider.

• "Tealium Event Stream" product is needed.
• Is the pixel in question possible to migrate to a server side solution.

Lets say the site has 50 pixels. In the simplest way possible, lets consider they would be HTTP GET requests. Something like:

<img src="//my_tracker1.com/?id=123&some_data1=data1&some_data2=data2">
<img src="//my_tracker2.com/?id=1444&some_data4=data4&some_data8=data8">

This means the loading of the page copes with all of those calls, whatever time it takes to make them.

So, by migrating the pixels to the server side, only one call is made ("Collect Tag"), that sends the required information that the pixels are expecting, and then on the server side we would make those 50 calls.

The page loading time would most likely have a different behavior.

Creating pixels like the ones mentioned are quite easy from "Event Stream".

Tealium cloud solution (Event Stream) supports other more complex TAGs like "Adobe Analytics".

I would recommend talking with the Account mananger to get a proper product presentation and to check the possibitlity of getting a working demo.

Hope this helps

[Frish]

Hi @ruipedromachado,
Thanks for taking the time to craft a detailed response, this makes a whole lot more sense now.

[calebjaquith]

@Frish - to add to @ruipedromachado's post, there's another important consideration when looking to move tags from the client-side to the server-side - cookies.  

Often, simple web-based trackers like the ones in Rui's post rely on 3rd party cookies to transmit meaningful data to the vendor in question, and/or set user-level identification cookies in the request response (with a Set-Cookie header). 

Without that user-level information, those outgoing requests wouldn't be useful (because the vendor wouldn't know which user has viewed that page, or which click to associate with the conversion, etc).  

That's why Tealium offers a number of Cookie Sync tags and related functionalities.  Those vendor-specific tags retrieve/create such cookies and allow the values to be persisted on Tealium's side so they can be sent to the vendor manually from our servers.  This example for Criteo and this one for TheTradeDesk have a bit more detail about the approach in AudienceStream (where you can persist that data on the Visitor Profile), and we've documented it more generally for EventStream as well (where we use our own third-party cookie to persist that data, since EventStream is event- (not profile-) driven.

Long story short, it's not quite as simple as just moving the tag, you also need to find out what additional information is generally delivered via 3rd party cookie to that vendor in their web-based solutuion, and find out if the vendors offers a way to retrieve it so that it can be persisted in Tealium and sent to the vendor accordingly.

Hope that helps?

Best, Caleb