iOS, Safari and Firefox all kill third-party cookies and limit script-based tracking. Server-side tagging is no longer optional. The migration playbook in plain English.
If your conversions dropped 30%+ in any of the iOS or Safari releases over the last 18 months, you are seeing browser tracking restrictions at work. Server-side tagging is the migration that recovers most of those signals.
Instead of the browser firing pixels directly to Google, Meta, etc., your site fires one event to your own server (Google Tag Manager Server-Side, Stape, or self-hosted). Your server then forwards to the ad platforms with first-party context, full IP, full headers.
Self-hosted on Google Cloud or Vercel: $80-200/mo plus a one-shot setup. Managed (Stape, etc.): $50-150/mo plus setup. The setup is 2-3 weeks of work to migrate every tag and validate the data flow.
You own the data layer now. If you break the tag, conversions stop flowing. Build with monitoring (Slack alerts on a 50% drop) and a fallback to client-side tagging during incidents.
We migrate clients to server-side tagging as part of every Google Ads and Meta Ads retainer. Audit your current tag coverage to see how much signal you are losing.