With server-side tagging, you can send any types of HTTP requests to the Server container. The Server container parses these, fires up container instances, and sends the data onwards to first-party data stores and third-party vendors alike. Often these requests contain URL strings encoded in query parameters. A prime example is the document location parameter in Universal Analytics requests. Server-side Clients would parse these URL strings and convert them into the format required by the event data object.

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Facebook has now officially released their Conversions API tag template for server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager. With this tag template, you can create a server-side tag that fires with any Client designed to parse requests into a unified event model. One such Client already exists, and every single Server container has it built-in: the GA4 Client. If you haven’t yet deployed a Server container, check out this video walkthrough for more details on how to do it.

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One of the biggest perks of working with server-side tagging is that you can establish a first-party context between the site sending the data and the server-side tagging endpoint itself. This leads to many benefits, including improved control of the data streams, the possibility to set cookies that extend beyond ITP’s restrictions, and reduced stress on an already very likely overloaded Content Security Policy. In this article, I’ll show you how to map multiple custom domains to your Google Cloud Project application.

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Ever since it was released that server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager would run on the Google Cloud Platform stack, my imagination has been running wild. By running on GCP, the potential for integrations with other GCP components is limitless. The output to Cloud Logging already introduces interesting pipeline opportunities, but now it gets even better. It’s finally possible to write directly to Google BigQuery from a Client or tag template!

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There’s a new custom variable template in town! The Data Layer Picker template lets you create variables that have a singular, exceptional (in Google Tag Manager’s context, at least) purpose: You can access the keys and values that were in the object pushed into dataLayer itself. And … that’s it! Read on to understand why this might be useful. Tip 123: Direct access to the dataLayer.push() If you know your Data Layer Variable, you’ll know that it comes in two versions.

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One of the largest costs in a server-side tagging can be logging. Google warns about this in their official documentation, and it’s definitely something to keep a keen eye on if your server-side endpoint processes enough data per month. How much should it process for logging to become an issue? It depends, but you could start seeing some impact once the endpoint processes >1 million incoming requests per month. The best way to find out if logging is a problem is to visit the Billing dashboard in your server-side tagging Google Cloud project and check what the portion of Log Volume is in your monthly costs.

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This will likely be the shortest blog article I have ever written, but I have just one short thing to say: SIMMER IS LIVE! Simmer is a new online course platform, where we bring technical marketing courses to your computer (or mobile device) screen with a straightforward, task-based approach. Our first class is aptly Server-side Tagging In Google Tag Manager, and it is open for enrollment right now, all the way until March 14th.

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