The Profit-First Retargeting Playbook
Jamie Vinkle
|Data & Analytics | November 20, 2025
Retarget on profit, not revenue – securely, with server-side tagging.
Marketers love conversions. The higher the revenue number, the better the algorithm seems to perform, or so we tell ourselves. But here’s the thing: not every sale drives growth. Some sales cost more to win than they return. That’s where the profit gap begins.
The Problem: When “Revenue Wins” Actually Lose
Most campaign algorithms are trained to chase revenue, not profit. When your retargeting platform optimizes for total revenue, it promotes whatever products are most likely to sell, not necessarily the ones that make you the most money.
For many brands, that’s meant pouring budget into campaigns that look great on the surface but quietly erode margins underneath.
The fix seems simple: feed your ad platform profit data instead of just revenue data. But that’s easier said than done.
Why Profit Data Gets Tricky
Profit isn’t public data, nor should it be. To pass it into your retargeting setup, you need to expose margin or cost information through your website’s data layer. That process:
- Requires ongoing coordination with your IT or engineering team.
- Involves data mapping that can easily break during site updates.
- Risks leaking sensitive pricing or margin information to anyone inspecting your site.
- Even if you manage to pull it off, keeping that data secure and synced across vendors is a constant headache.
Enter: Server-Side Tagging
With CHEQ Server-Side Tagging, you can retarget on profit, securely, accurately, and without engineering chaos.
Instead of sending data in the browser (where it can be seen and manipulated), CHEQ connects directly to your back-end database, pulling profit information and sending it to your ad vendors through a fully server-side environment.
That means:
- Your margin data never lives client-side (no exposure risk).
- You don’t need IT to rebuild your data layer.
- You can pass any metric (profit, LTV, fulfillment cost, refund probability) directly to ad platforms.
Smarter Profit Data, Safer Delivery
The best part? CHEQ’s approach is database-agnostic. Whether you store product data in Snowflake, Postgres, Firestore, or a home-grown solution, CHEQ’s connectors can pull and deliver the right data securely.
That flexibility means your marketing team can experiment and optimize freely, without being boxed in by platform limitations. Competitors often lock you into specific ecosystems or require data to be pushed through browser scripts. CHEQ keeps it simple — and private.
What That Looks Like in Practice
One CHEQ customer, a large ecommerce retailer, realized their highest-revenue SKUs weren’t their most profitable. By connecting their internal margin database to CHEQ Server-Side Tagging, they were able to retarget based on profit per item instead of gross revenue.
Within weeks, their campaigns began prioritizing higher-margin products automatically, increasing return on ad spend (ROAS) and lowering acquisition costs.
In short, they stopped buying revenue and started buying profit.
Why This Matters Now
As ad budgets tighten and privacy rules evolve, marketers need to squeeze more performance out of every impression, without exposing sensitive data.
Server-side tagging bridges that gap. It lets marketing teams act on the best possible data (like profit) without compromising on privacy, compliance, or technical complexity.
Instead of asking engineering for a six-week sprint to rewire your data layer, you can flip the switch once and start sending the right signals directly from your database.
The Results
- Retarget based on profit, not just revenue.
- Keep data secure and private, entirely server-side.
- Stay database-agnostic — no platform lock-ins.
The Takeaway
The next era of performance marketing isn’t just about better targeting. It’s about smarter data strategy.
CHEQ Server-Side Tagging gives marketers the tools to finally align ad spend with what matters most: profitability. Because when your campaigns run on profit data, every click starts working for your bottom line…not against it.
Book a demo with us today and see how using Server-Side Tagging in CHEQ Manage can help your business.
