What is a Reverse Proxy implementation?
Context
Eulerian collects behavioral data to power decision-making marketing solutions for the Acquisition and Analytics functions of B2C and B2B companies.
Historically, marketing and advertising industry players have collected behavioral data via a web SDK (also called a Javascript Tag) that sends collection requests from the user's browser. This is called "client-side" tracking.
With the rise of ad blockers and technical restrictions related to privacy issues, the third-party cookie used by many industry players is set to disappear by September 2024, with a strongly negative impact expected on the quality and quantity of available data.
Already today, ad blockers and privacy plugins can intercept requests sent by an analytics solution and prevent them from reaching its (the analytics solution's) servers.
Since 2006, Eulerian has operated an entirely first-party collection and is not impacted by the announced disappearance of third-party cookies. However, a Reverse Proxy implementation allows an Eulerian client to optimize the quality of behavioral data collection, particularly with regard to a first-party collection context increasingly challenged by Apple on its operating systems (iOS in particular) and on its browser (Safari).
With a Reverse Proxy, you can route collection requests through your own domain (mysite(.)com) and ensure that they are sent transparently and efficiently to your Eulerian platform.
What is a Reverse Proxy?
A Reverse Proxy is a solution installed, deployed and maintained by the Eulerian client's IT team, directly in its technical infrastructure.
Technically, it is a server that acts as an intermediary between a user's browser and a web server.
When a user's navigation on your site mysite(.)com generates requests to an Eulerian server, these requests are intercepted by the Reverse Proxy, which routes them to another backend server (yours), before transferring them to the Eulerian server.
Before transmitting them, the Reverse Proxy therefore acts as a gateway, collecting requests made to a specific address on your domain (mysite(.)com/collecte), then transferring them to another domain (eulerian(.)com).
Once the appropriate server receives and processes these requests, it sends the response back to the reverse proxy, which then forwards it to the user.
Why use a Reverse Proxy?
A reverse proxy offers several advantages:
Ensure accurate data collection
For the portion of your traffic that uses ad blockers or privacy plugins, requests to Eulerian servers may occasionally be intercepted and the lifetime of the first-party identifier may be limited.
Using a Reverse Proxy ensures that you can bypass limitations and ensure quality and sustainable data collection.
Control over web traffic
A Reverse Proxy also allows you to exercise more precise control over the communication between your website and our applications and services.
Link to source browser
By deploying a Reverse Proxy and unlike a fully server-side solution, Eulerian can still interact with the client browser and the application of your client-side site.
This allows you to keep the best of both worlds by avoiding cutting yourself off from existing functionalities enabling certain business use cases, including, for example, the exchange of data with personalization tools (A/B testing).
To summarize, you can optimize your existing setup by setting up an advanced tracking setup where you capture analytics data on your own domain and then push it to Eulerian.