Technical Details on Elevar's Server-Side Tracking
Learn more how Elevar's server-side tracking works for your store.
Overview
An easy way to think about how Elevar's server-side tracking works for Shopify is to imagine it as a delivery truck that sends data to your marketing channel, thus enabling you to 'own' your data, for example, in Google Analytics.
Elevar's Functions:
- Elevar accepts data from your online store, Shopify webhooks, and other compatible sources.
- This data is routed to your destinations and configured within your dashboard based on options.
Elevar Hosting
Elevar is hosted on Google Cloud and utilizes the most advanced techniques to ensure maximum throughput and uptime. During BFCM 2023, Elevar was processing thousands of conversions per second.
- Elevar's hosted solution utilized serverless functionality where we can control every aspect of scale including active regions and the number of concurrent instances.
- Our hosted solution utilizes pub/sub in our big data pipeline so that any messages received by our systems must be acknowledged to be considered successfully processed. This means that failures will be retried and built up. They can be later processed with any sporadic outages.
- Our hosted solution is load-tested with advanced support from Google. Google has no upper limit for function scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens if Elevar experiences an outage?
If it is an issue with Google Cloud (which affects all customers within Google) then we will replay webhook events from Shopify when Google comes back online. This is rare and has only happened once in the last 2+ years for ~ 2 hours. Elevar was able to successfully replay all conversion events resulting in no data loss to customer destinations.
The other scenario we've experienced is when there is an issue with Shopify webhooks. Shopify typically replays their webhooks to minimize data loss. We've seen this once in the past 2 years as well.
Our sitewide data layer javascript is a hosted CDN script just like any other script that all websites utilize today -- Klaviyo javascript, google-analytics.js, etc.
Elevar also has automated monitoring that will alert you anytime tracking falls below your target accuracy threshold (ex. if 95% of orders are not successfully sent to your destination in the last 2 hours then you will be alerted). Learn more about this feature here.
Can I use my own servers to host this data?
Elevar does not support the ability to utilize your own servers. If you prefer to go this route you can utilize Google Tag Manager server-side containers in Google Cloud.
Do I "own" the data that Elevar collects?
Elevar is not a data warehouse or business intelligence tool. We do not store data collected from data sources other than the temporary storage required to route data to your end destinations. So in essence, you still own the data in all of your data destinations, just like you would with other integrations.
Elevar does store logging and monitoring data.
Updated 6 months ago