MarTech Interview with Greg Brunk, Head of Product at MetaRouter

Greg, could you start by sharing a bit about your professional journey and your role at MetaRouter?
I’ve spent most of my career in engineering and product roles, so co-founding MetaRouter as a technical lead was natural. We recognized a significant need for server-side integration and tagging for large-scale enterprises, which led us to build MetaRouter. Over the past six years, I have helped shape our company’s product vision, focusing on solutions that give enterprises maximum ownership and control over the sensitive data their users entrust them with.

My role involves leading product development, advocating for compliance-controlled private cloud infrastructure in a SaaS-dominated market and addressing the various complex data needs of large enterprises. At the end of the day, my job is to advocate for MetaRouter’s core belief: Enterprises should have full control over their customer data because it creates more responsible data management and better alignment of incentives between businesses and their customers.

With the holiday season around the corner, what are the biggest challenges retailers are facing regarding privacy regulations and the phase-out of third-party cookies?
Two main challenges are impacting retailers as they plan for the holiday season.

First, balancing personalization and privacy. Retailers often rely on third-party cookies and vendors to push personalized offerings to consumers. But this has become a balancing act. Consumers want fast, effective and personalized experiences, but they also expect the highest degree of consent enforcement and data privacy.

Second, retailers must have highly performant user experiences, especially during high-traffic periods, such as the holidays. Data must be collected and used in a way that optimizes their digital properties for maximum conversion. We believe server-side customer data integration answers both of these challenges.

Can you explain how server-side data collection helps retailers navigate these challenges?
Server-side data collection offers retailers a powerful solution to navigate privacy challenges. By moving data collection and integration workflows to their own private cloud, retailers gain enhanced control over data processing, creating a safe space to enforce consent and privacy, while reducing reliance on browser-based tags and cookies. This approach provides more consistent and secure data, improves website performance and stability, and enables unified data collection across different platforms. Server-side implementation allows for greater control over data sharing, encourages a focus on valuable first-party data and offers the flexibility to adapt to changing regulations. It also helps create a more complete view of the customer journey, which is crucial during omnichannel holiday shopping.

Ultimately, server-side data collection enables retailers to balance their need for detailed customer insights with respect for privacy requirements, setting the foundation for sustainable, privacy-conscious data practices in an evolving digital landscape.

How does server-side data collection improve the quality and accuracy of customer data for retailers?
By utilizing a single point of data collection in a first-party, server-side environment before delivery to third-party vendors, enterprises can bypass many common issues that affect client-side data collection. This method is less susceptible to browser extensions and user-side modifications that can skew data. It also ensures more consistent and normalized data feeds are delivered to downstream Paid Media, Marketing and Analytics platforms. We’ve seen firsthand that crucial metrics like purchases and conversions can differ dramatically between third-party reports on the same website. As a marketing or media leader, it is crucial to ensure parity in the data feeding your various tools.

Server-side collection also allows for real-time data validation and enrichment before it’s stored or sent to other systems. This not only reduces errors and inconsistencies but also allows for the secure enrichment of more detailed identities and insights about users without exposing that information to the open internet. With this method, retailers have greater control over data governance, leading to more reliable, consistent and high-quality data that they can confidently use for decision-making in marketing, media, personalization and customer experience optimization.

What impact does enhanced data accuracy have on holiday campaigns and advertisements?
With more reliable customer data, retailers can create highly targeted, personalized marketing strategies that resonate with individual shoppers. This leads to more effective ad placements, relevant product recommendations and tailored promotions. This precision drives higher conversion rates and sales during the crucial holiday season. Accurate and identity-rich data enables better customer segmentation, improved timing of marketing communications and more precise attribution of marketing efforts, allowing retailers to optimize ad spend and focus on the most effective channels. Better parity between data feeds to third parties can also significantly improve performance reporting and forecasting across channels.

Beyond improving campaign performance, enhanced data accuracy contributes to a better overall customer experience, potentially increasing satisfaction, loyalty and long-term value. This extends the benefits of holiday campaigns well beyond the season itself, setting the foundation for stronger customer relationships year-round.

How does MetaRouter’s approach to server-side data collection differ from other solutions in the market?
Our approach differs in two ways. First, our data collection is addressable for anonymous and known users in all downstream platforms, thanks to our Sync Injector. We sync with all the paid media, analytics and other platforms you intend to integrate customer data with to ensure we have identifiers that create maximum match, regardless of whether the user is known or unknown. Most other server-side integration platforms are built only for known users. Second, our entire product prioritizes data privacy and security via our consent enforcement tooling and completely first-party, single-tenant private cloud infrastructure.

What technical limitations does server-side data collection address that other methods do not?
Traditional tagging methods (known as client-side tagging) require tags to load on the user’s browser. This method creates latency and contributes to a slower, bloated user experience (UX), which increases bounce rates, hurts conversion and results in significant SEO penalties. Furthermore, client-side tagging is more susceptible to ad blockers, contributing to significant signal loss and variability between data sets in downstream platforms. First-party server-side tagging, on the other hand, removes the burden of loading tags from the site, enabling faster website performance and higher customer satisfaction.

These benefits are always helpful, but they become absolutely critical during the holiday season. Server-side tagging helps ensure that a seasonal influx of customers won’t result in dismal website performance due to client-side tags. In other words, retailers can continue to capture user activity effectively and securely, even as record-high numbers of customers visit their e-commerce sites.

How does server-side data collection transform customer interactions, particularly during the busy holiday season?
Consumers no longer buy from generic marketing campaigns, as they are bombarded with 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. Server-side data collection, enriched with a strong identity framework for known and unknown users, revolutionizes customer interactions by providing retailers with granular insights to deliver highly personalized experiences to their entire customer base, especially during the hectic holiday season. By capturing accurate and comprehensive customer data, businesses can tailor product recommendations, promotions and communication to individual preferences, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This data-driven approach enables retailers to identify high-value customer segments, optimize marketing efforts and enhance customer service, ultimately driving sales and building long-term relationships.

In your experience, what are the key considerations for retailers when transitioning to server-side data collection?
It’s really three things: own your own data, ensure it is usable for unknown and known users, and ensure your infrastructure can scale as your business grows. You don’t want to rely on an ever-changing landscape of marketing, advertising and analytics vendors to adapt on your behalf. Put yourself in the driver’s seat and take back control from the dozens of third parties consuming your data via their own tags in any fashion they prefer. That’s a risk profile you can’t afford in today’s regulatory and competitive environment. Own your collection and integration infrastructure to make sure you have the right identity, quality assurance and privacy controls over your data before anyone else touches it. That’s what’s best for you and your customers, and will serve as a significant competitive advantage against your peers.

How is MetaRouter preparing to support retailers in optimizing their strategies with server-side data collection for the upcoming holiday season?
MetaRouter is at the forefront of solving the unique technical challenges that retailers face, especially for evolving use cases like building out their Customer Data Platform and Retail Media Network (RMN) strategies. While our core expertise lies in Server-Side Tag Management and replacement, our SyncInjector™ technology and advanced data pipelining and enrichment capabilities have positioned us as a critical partner for retailers diving into the RMN space.

As the concept of RMNs gains traction, particularly among large retailers with extensive e-commerce platforms, we’ve observed significant variability in data infrastructure maturity across our customers and prospects. MetaRouter aims to help significantly accelerate a retailer’s maturation through that technical landscape. By serving as a central hub for data collection, identity enrichment, advanced transformation and broad integration, we serve as a foundational hub for taking online new critical components in the RMN design, such as reporting, warehousing, clean rooms and CDPs. This centralization allows us to simplify the architecture and dramatically speed up time-to-value by syndicating the event stream to all necessary platforms simultaneously, effectively solving many of the complexities retailers face.

We’ve identified four key stages in the evolution of RMNs, and MetaRouter plays a crucial role in each:

• • Stage 1: Basic On-Site Ad Serving: At this stage, retailers need to serve ads, track impressions and deliver these metrics to their brand partners. MetaRouter provides a seamless mechanism for tracking impression and purchase events to a single endpoint while addressing the data distribution challenges associated with real-time reporting. Additionally, we ensure data capture aligns with customer privacy preferences and consent requirements.
  • Stage 2: Expanding to Offsite: As retailers expand their RMNs to include off-site advertising, they need the ability to build and provide audiences and reporting to brands that are addressable within off-site paid media platforms. This requires compatible identity profiles that can be activated across offsite platforms. MetaRouter enables this via our Sync Injector, unifying the necessary behavioral and anonymous to known identity data, into the clean-room, CDP or directly into the paid media platforms. This allows retailers to empower their brand partners to run offsite campaigns that drive traffic back to their digital properties.
  • Stage 3: Full-Service Digital Ad Offerings: In this stage, the retailer’s RMN evolves into a full-fledged media offering. This is where retailers aim to increase their revenue beyond pure data delivery by offering a variety of retail media services, such as attribution reporting, ad performance measurement, campaign creation capabilities and ongoing optimization services. MetaRouter supports these activities by providing a large library of destinations to the various tools necessary to execute the functions.

• Stage 4: Non-Endemic Advertising: Finally, as RMNs mature, retailers may look to monetize their customer data insights independently of driving direct purchases on their own retail platform. This stage requires a strong technical foundation and strategic maturity across the business. MetaRouter supports this evolution by providing the privacy, obfuscation and data management capabilities necessary for retailers to make their data available to brands and businesses beyond those they carry in their stores, potentially generating revenue streams untethered from traditional retail KPIs.

By addressing the unique needs at each stage of RMN evolution, MetaRouter helps retailers navigate the complexities of RMN strategy and execution, positioning them for success in this rapidly growing space.