Why Hardal Exists

The world broke marketing measurement

For 20 years, digital advertising worked on a simple assumption: if you put a pixel on your website, you could track what users did and connect it back to your campaigns. That infrastructure is collapsing.

Safari's ITP started it. iOS 14's App Tracking Transparency made it serious. Chrome's Privacy Sandbox is finishing it. GDPR and KVKK mean that even when tracking is technically possible, it's legally risky without proper consent management. Ad blockers now reach more than 30% of web traffic in some markets.

The result: marketers are flying blind. Conversion rates look wrong. Attribution models are broken. Budgets are being allocated based on data that's missing a third of the picture.

The industry's response was wrong

The default response has been to optimize around the restrictions - find new workarounds, exploit consent dark patterns, or shrug and tell marketers to "trust the models."

We think that's the wrong bet. Privacy regulations are getting stricter, not looser. Apple and Google are making client-side tracking harder every year. Companies that build on workarounds are building on sand.

The right bet is to build infrastructure that works because of the privacy constraints, not in spite of them.

What server-side tracking actually is

When you collect data through a browser, it's visible to ad blockers, restricted by browser policies, and technically third-party data because it passes through someone else's servers. This is why it's disappearing.

When you collect data server-to-server - from your own infrastructure, under your own domain - it's first-party data. It's not blocked by Safari. It's not restricted by iOS. It's yours. And because you control the pipeline, you can hash PII before it leaves your servers, enforce consent logic in one place, and send clean data to Google, Meta, TikTok, and your data warehouse simultaneously.

This is what Hardal does. We run the server-side infrastructure - the sGTM hosting, the first-party domain setup, the destination integrations - so that marketing teams can focus on their campaigns instead of DevOps.

Why this is hard to build in-house

The technical setup isn't rocket science. The hard part is everything else:

• Keeping the infrastructure current as platform APIs change
• Maintaining integrations for 20+ destinations across Google, Meta, TikTok, Adjust, AppsFlyer, and others
• Handling the compliance layer (consent pass-through, GDPR, KVKK, data residency)
• Providing the monitoring and alerting to know when something breaks before a customer does

Most marketing teams don't have the engineering bandwidth to do this well. Most DevOps teams don't have the marketing context to configure it correctly. We sit at that intersection.

Why Turkey first

Turkey is an interesting market for this. Digital ad spend is growing fast. Privacy regulations (KVKK) are strict. iOS ATT and Safari ITP have the same impact here as anywhere. But the awareness of server-side solutions has been lower than in Western Europe.

That gave us a window to build the category. We're not the third company to do this in Turkey - we're the first with serious traction. Being category-creator in a $1B+ market is a meaningful starting position.

Beyond Turkey, we've already expanded into Spain, the UK, and broader Europe. The problem is global. The infrastructure is the same everywhere.

What we're building toward

We want Hardal to be the default measurement infrastructure layer for marketing-focused companies in emerging markets - starting in Turkey and expanding across Europe and the Middle East.

Not just an sGTM hosting provider. The layer that sits between a company's customer interactions and all their marketing platforms: tracking, attribution, consent, mobile, data governance.

The companies that figure out privacy-first measurement in the next three years will have a durable advantage over competitors who are still relying on client-side tracking. We want to be the infrastructure they build on.

Why us

We started Hardal as a side project because we saw the problem ourselves. Berkay was building tracking infrastructure and kept hitting the same walls. Barış was working with marketing teams who were losing visibility into their customers.

We're not a consulting firm that decided to build software. We're engineers and growth people who got frustrated and built the tool we wished existed. That background shapes how we build - obsessively practical, close to the customer, allergic to over-engineering.

We've also chosen to stay based at the intersection of engineering and marketing. A lot of analytics tools are built by engineers for engineers. A lot of marketing tools are too simple to be trustworthy. We're trying to be the thing that's both rigorous enough to trust and approachable enough to actually use.

That's what we're building. If it sounds like something you want to be part of, we're hiring.