Why Datafly Signal
Marketing data infrastructure has not kept up with the browser, the regulator, or the buyer.
Tag managers stacked vendor scripts on your pages until pages stopped loading. CDPs centralised your customer data inside their cloud and charged you per connector to get it out. Server-side tagging finally moved the request to a backend, but kept the vendor JavaScript in the browser, kept your data in someone else’s infrastructure, and kept the per-connector pricing model intact.
Datafly Signal is what comes next. A single 5.2KB collector replaces every vendor tag. Every event is collected, governed, and delivered server-to-server from infrastructure you own. No vendor scripts in the browser. No multi-tenant SaaS holding your customer data. No per-connector fees. No ambiguity about whose cloud account holds your first-party data.
This is first-party signal infrastructure, and it’s the category your marketing team has been waiting for.
Between 20% and 40% of desktop visitors block client-side analytics tags. These are typically your most engaged, highest-value customers (exactly the segment you most need to measure). They convert. You just can’t see it. Your campaigns optimise on incomplete data. Your media spend favours the channels that look good in your dashboard rather than the ones actually driving revenue.
Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention treats client-set cookies as third-party tracking and limits their lifetime to seven days. Every customer who researches for longer than a week becomes a “new visitor.” Multi-touch attribution breaks. Look-alike audiences shrink. ROAS calculations stop reflecting what’s actually happening.
GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, and the EU Digital Markets Act demand audit trails proving consent decisions were enforced before data left your environment. Client-side tags cannot produce that audit trail. Server-side platforms running on multi-tenant SaaS produce one, but it lives in the vendor’s cloud, under the vendor’s data processing agreement, and that’s the agreement your CISO has to trust.
A typical enterprise site loads 800KB+ of vendor JavaScript before the first product image appears. Every second of additional load time costs 3-5% in conversions. Mobile conversion rates have flatlined for half a decade. Vendor tags are a measurable contributor, and the easiest one to fix.
Server-side tagging solves part of the problem. Events leave the browser via your subdomain instead of the vendor’s domain. So far, so good.
But most server-side platforms then route those events through the vendor’s own multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure. Your customer data lands in their cloud account. Their certifications cover it. Their data residency rules apply. Their incident response plan is the one your security team has to trust at three in the morning.
Datafly Signal is customer-hosted by design. Signal deploys into your AWS, GCP, or Azure account using Helm charts and Kubernetes, or onto a virtual server using Docker Compose if a full Kubernetes deployment is more than your team needs. Your customer data never touches Datafly-controlled infrastructure. The certifications that already cover your cloud environment (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP where applicable) apply to Signal because Signal runs inside that boundary.
This is the distinction that matters in every procurement, security, and legal conversation. Not server-side. Customer-hosted, server-side.
Vendor-hosted SSTM
Your data sits in someone else’s cloud
Customer-hosted Signal
Your data never leaves your VPC
The architectural choices that separate Signal from every other server-side platform on the market.
Sovereignty & trust
Your cloud, your IAM, your DPA. The vendor footprint is the Helm chart and the support relationship. Nothing else.
Signal runs entirely in your cloud account or on your virtual servers. Not "single-tenant" inside a vendor's cluster. Not "isolated namespace" inside someone else's Kubernetes. Your cloud, your VPC, your network policies, your IAM.
No Datafly engineer can reach your cluster, data, dashboard, or configuration. Hands-on support requires explicit, time-bound, scoped access. We see only what you choose to expose, for as long as you expose it.
The admin UI runs in your cluster alongside the platform itself, not a SaaS console managed by Datafly. You control logins, authentication routes, and how the UI is exposed.
Performance & scale
One platform that fits a single VPS or a multi-cluster deployment processing 5 million events per second. You scale Signal as you scale.
Up to
5M
events / second
Scales from a single VPS to multi-cluster Kubernetes
Signal is engineered as an event streaming platform, not an HTTP proxy. Run on a single VPS for early-stage workloads or scale to multi-cluster Kubernetes for 5M events per second when you need it. Apache Kafka decouples ingestion from delivery so your collection endpoint never blocks waiting for a slow vendor API. Each component scales horizontally and independently.
The lightest collector in the industry. Replaces every vendor tracking script on your pages (typically 800KB+ of combined JavaScript across analytics, advertising, and conversion pixels) with a single 5.2KB collector served from your subdomain.
Re-identifies returning visitors after they clear cookies, using SHA-256 hashed signals already present in every HTTP request. No fingerprinting scripts. No raw signals stored. Configurable per organisation.
Identity & match quality
Vendor IDs generated server-side and stored on your cluster. Maximum match quality on every event, including for Meta CAPI.
Meta CAPI Event Match Quality
Most server-side implementations stall at EMQ 5–6 because they lack browser identifiers. Signal generates _fbp server-side, captures _fbc from fbclid, and sends the complete identity parameter set on every event. Better Meta optimisation, lower CPA, higher ROAS.
GA client_id, _fbp/_fbc, _ttp, click IDs, and attribution tokens are all generated and stored server-side. The browser only sends a single first-party identifier (_dfid), so each event payload is smaller and pages load faster. Vendor IDs persist for 400 days and are enriched onto every event server-side. Ad blockers cannot strip what isn't there.
Every conversion event arrives at every vendor with the full identity parameter set already attached. No vendor JavaScript required to generate any of it. No identity gaps that destroy match quality.
Built-in capabilities
One platform that does what you would otherwise buy three for. Including the client-side bit other server-side tools refuse to touch.
Server-side TM
Tealium iQ, Adobe Launch, sGTM…
Client-side TM
Vendor JS in browser
Datafly Signal
One platform. Both worlds.
Other server-side platforms are purely server-side. Datafly Signal also injects cut-down, server-controlled JavaScript for vendors that genuinely need a browser-side touch point (Braze, in-app messaging, surveys, recommendation widgets). One platform replaces both your server-side and client-side tag managers. No juggling two stacks.
First-click, last-click, linear, time-decay, position-based, and custom rules. Conversion values route to each vendor by your chosen model. Per-vendor deduplication automatic. Multi-touch attribution that reflects how customers buy.
Register brand partners. Field-level data access control. Brands self-serve their own integrations. Turn your first-party data into a measurable revenue stream without rebuilding the platform.
Pricing principle
Per-connector pricing is the silent tax on most server-side tag managers and delivery platforms. Every new vendor your marketing team wants to test costs more. Finance pushes back. The integration that would unlock a 10% efficiency gain gets deferred to next quarter, then the quarter after, then it never gets tested at all.
Datafly Signal includes every integration in the base price. No tier upgrades to unlock destinations. No surcharges per connector. Pricing scales with events processed, not with how many platforms you want to run.
Signal is the delivery layer your CDP has been waiting for. Your CDP defines audiences and orchestrates journeys. Signal delivers the resulting first-party signal to every destination, server-to-server, with no per-connector tax. Two systems doing what they each do best.
130+
Included
£0
Per-connector
We won’t be the right fit for everyone. Honesty here filters out the prospects who would burn your sales cycle anyway.
Book a walkthrough, compare against your current platform, or read the docs.