About yfood
Founded in Munich, yfood is Europe’s market leader in the smart food category. Its ready-to-drink meals are available in over 30 countries and 28,000 retail outlets. As a digital-first brand, yfood’s growth is driven by data and performance marketing.
Executive Summary
As a digital-first brand across Europe, yfood relies on data to fuel its performance marketing. With stricter privacy regulations, consent barriers, and ad blockers eroding traditional tracking, yfood partnered with JENTIS to implement a first-party data strategy. By combining server-side tagging, advanced consent management, and AI-assisted customer activation with Synthetic Users, yfood regained control over its tracking and saw measurable performance lifts in just three weeks: +1.9% tracked conversions, a 5.2% increase in attributed revenue, and significantly improved ROAS across campaigns by more than 5%, among other successes
Challenge
In 2023, yfood experienced first-hand how privacy regulations and technical restrictions were undermining online tracking and performance measurement. According to yfood, even with a consent rate above 85%, they were only capturing 30–40% of user interactions, leaving major gaps in attribution and customer journey data. Browser restrictions like Safari’s ITP, Firefox’s ETP, and widespread ad blocker use compounded the problem.
With Google’s third-party cookie deprecation on the horizon, it became clear that the existing client-side setup was no longer sufficient for reliable performance measurement or budget allocation.
Solution
To address these challenges, yfood overhauled its analytics and tracking stack, ultimately choosing JENTIS over Google Tag Manager. GTM was dismissed due to operational and legal limitations, including higher resource demands, objections from yfood’s data protection officer, and no support for Synthetic Users, a key capability to recover lost tracking data. JENTIS provided a futureproof, privacy-compliant server-side tagging infrastructure. Crucially, it enabled Synthetic Users to recover lost tracking data in non-consent scenarios, giving yfood a scalable and legally robust setup ready for future technical and regulatory changes.
Synthetic Users
yfood replaced their client-side Google Tag Manager with the JENTIS server-side Tag Manager. The smooth rollout required minimal developer resources, and JENTIS’ native, ready-to-use connectors enabled immediate integration with yfood’s marketing and analytics tools including Google Ads, Meta, Shopify, and their consent management solution CookieFirst. Running in Essential Mode, the setup respected user consent while recovering otherwise lost interactions. To validate improvements, yfood ran parallel tracking: a GA4 test property via JENTIS alongside the original client-side property, and a Meta pixel through JENTIS benchmarked against the AWS-based Conversion API Gateway
Results & Impact
By replacing Google Tag Manager with the JENTIS server-side Tag Manager and leveraging Synthetic Users, yfood restored lost tracking data in a privacy-compliant way. Parallel testing showed a 5.2% increase in attributed revenue, over 94% data accuracy, and ROAS improvements across all campaigns — solidifying JENTIS as a key enabler of future-proof data strategy and sustainable growth. Brand campaigns increased from 677.2% to 711.1% and non-brand campaigns from 92.3% to 98.4%. Despite the short timeframe, the results underline the effectiveness of Synthetic Users, which not only recovers lost data but also give yfood a strategic safeguard against future tightening of data protection rules.
JENTIS ist eine zukunftssichere MarTech-Lösung mit zuverlässigem serverseitigem Tracking, betreuter Infrastruktur und einem Team, das uns kompetent bei allen Fragen rund um First-Party-Daten unterstützt.
