Full Answer

Traditional tracking relies on JavaScript pixels loading in the visitor's browser. Ad blockers, Safari ITP, and iOS privacy settings intercept these scripts before they fire. Server-side tracking moves event collection to a server you control: when a WooCommerce order completes, the order hook fires on the server with complete purchase data including order ID, revenue, and customer email, and your server sends this to platform APIs directly. For WooCommerce specifically, the WordPress server already processes every order server-side via hooks like woocommerce_payment_complete. Server-side tracking plugs directly into these hooks, capturing events from infrastructure that already exists. No GTM is required. No browser JavaScript is involved at the conversion event layer. The result: purchases are recorded even when the visitor's browser blocks every tracking script, because the conversion data never touches the browser.