/SERVICES

The challenge

Lottery is an event-driven business. On a quiet day, the platform handles around 1.5 million tagging requests. On a EuroMillions drawing day with a large jackpot, that number can triple to over 6 million requests in a single day. The difference between a regular Tuesday and a record-breaking Superdraw is not gradual. Traffic ramps up hard in the hours before a draw closes, peaks sharply, and drops again after the results come in.

Client-side tagging (the traditional approach where tracking scripts run in the visitor's browser) breaks down in this kind of environment. Ad blockers strip out tags, browsers impose restrictions, and the data that does arrive is inconsistent and incomplete. For a company that needs reliable data to understand player behavior, optimize campaigns, and report accurately, that is not good enough.

Nationale Loterij needed a tagging infrastructure that could absorb unpredictable spikes without dropping events, deliver consistent data regardless of what happens in the browser, and do all of this without manual intervention on busy days.

The solution

NubeX deployed a Google Tag Manager Server-Side (sGTM) environment on Google Cloud Platform. The architecture runs entirely on Cloud Run in the europe-west1 region, keeping data within the EU and close to the end users.

Autoscaling for drawing days

The production service runs with a minimum baseline of instances at all times, ensuring requests are served without cold-start latency even during quiet periods. When traffic ramps up, Cloud Run automatically scales the service out to handle the load. The environment is configured to scale up to 70 instances if needed.

Drawing days see the highest concurrency, with the system automatically provisioning additional capacity in the minutes before peak traffic arrives. Once the rush subsides, it scales back down. No manual intervention, no over-provisioning, no wasted resources on quiet days.

Data pipeline to BigQuery

Every event that passes through the server-side container is processed and forwarded to BigQuery for analysis. The data is organized by event type: pageviews, purchases, registrations, and top-ups, each landing in dedicated tables partitioned by day. This gives the analytics team a clean, queryable dataset that reflects actual user behavior without the gaps that client-side tracking introduces.

A separate data monitoring function, built in Python and running on Cloud Functions, continuously validates that events are flowing correctly. If the pipeline stalls or data patterns deviate from expected baselines, the team knows immediately.

Monitoring and reliability

NubeX monitors the entire environment around the clock. Key metrics tracked include:

• Request volume per service (with alerting on unusual drops or spikes)
• Instance scaling behavior and response times
• Error rates and response code distribution
• Data pipeline health and event delivery completeness

The monitoring setup means the NubeX team has visibility into whether tomorrow's EuroMillions Superdraw will be handled cleanly, before the first ticket buyer even opens the website.

Results

The server-side tagging infrastructure processes over 20 million requests per week during peak periods. It has handled single-day peaks of nearly 6 million requests without degradation. Scaling happens automatically and cost-efficiently, with the platform only consuming resources proportional to actual demand.

Nationale Loterij now has reliable, complete data on every meaningful interaction across their digital platforms. The data is not subject to ad blockers or browser restrictions. It arrives in BigQuery within seconds and is ready for analysis. Drawing days, which used to represent a data quality challenge, now produce the cleanest and most complete datasets of the week.

NubeX manages the infrastructure, the scaling configuration, and the monitoring. The Nationale Loterij team focuses on what the data tells them, not on whether it arrived.

Running a platform with unpredictable traffic spikes? Contact us to discuss how we can help.

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