Analytics

With the introduction of server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager, the variety of things you can do with your own server-side proxy is mind-boggling:

• Reduce client-side bloat by consolidating data streams and distributing them to vendor endpoints server-side.
• Improve data security by adding safeguards and validations to prevent harmful data from being sent to vendor endpoints.
• Enrich data server-side, by combining the incoming data stream with data from APIs and data stores that you own and control.
• Remove third-party downloads from the browser by proxying them via the server-side container.

This last point is what this article expands on. If you check out this video (jumps straight to the relevant part), you can see how it’s possible to already proxy popular libraries like analytics.js and gtag.js.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention is the name of the tracking prevention mechanism implemented in WebKit and enabled in Safari and all major browsers running on the iOS platform. I’ve written about it on this blog, and the CookieStatus.com resource is something you should bookmark for further reading.

The purpose of ITP is to prevent tracking tools’ access to data stored and processed in the browser. This involves things like blocking all third-party cookies and restricting the lifetime of first-party cookies.

On the surface, tracking events in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is fairly simple. Events are, after all, pretty much the only thing you can collect in GA4.

It’s easy to get tied down with endless comparisons to Universal Analytics, though. While I’m steadfastly opposed to the idea that GA4 should resemble Universal Analytics, it’s still important to cleanse the palate and approach GA4’s event tracking with an open mind.

There are some comparisons that can be drawn between the new and the old, but what GA4 might lack in some features and use cases, it more than makes up for this with a more flexible data structure.

The release of bulk actions in the Google Tag Manager user interface was very welcome. For years, GTM users had been struggling with a somewhat crippled workflow of item-by-item management.

This release is even more impressive with the most recent update to it: bulk actions with TRIGGERS.

You can now select multiple tags and attach one or more triggers (or exceptions) to them. Or, conversely, you can use the feature to remove triggers (or exceptions) from tags.

Last updated 17 March 2023: Item-scoped Custom Dimensions are now available in Google Analytics 4.

This is an implementation guide for Google Analytics 4. The guide is aimed at Google Tag Manager users and has been designed to complement the official documentation.

A thing to keep in mind is that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is still very new. The Google Tag Manager integration is still in its infancy, and implementation places a lot of responsibility on accurate tagging and proper dataLayer instrumentation.

Last updated 12 February 2021: Clarified how Preview is shared.

Your favorite tagging platform, Google Tag Manager, now comes equipped with a completely revamped preview mode experience.

Gone are the days of having to minimize the debug pane to prevent it from hogging up screen real estate on the website.

Gone are the days of having to use browser extensions to see what happened in GTM on previous page loads.

Gone are the days of trying to squint really hard at the illegible debug pane while in mobile emulation mode.

Note! This is about the original version of Consent Mode. While the content is still very valid and you should read through it to understand how it works, Google has since released a “V2” update with additional consent signals. You can read about Consent Mode V2 here. . Not too long ago, Google announced a new consent mode for Google tags. It allows you to build a mechanism where Google’s tags parse, react, and respond to the consent status of your site visitors.

Read More…

It’s lovely to see small, incremental, quality-of-life improvements to Google Tag Manager amid the behemothian feature releases such as custom templates in 2019 and server-side tagging in 2020.

This time around, we’ll take a look at the upgraded search functionality of the Google Tag Manager user interface, which makes search an actually useful tool. In addition to this, we’ll take a look at one of the most requested features in the history of Google Tag Manager, which we finally have access to: bulk actions!

Exporting a container in Google Tag Manager can have many purposes. From backing up Google Tag Manager versions to creating and distributing repositories of useful container snapshots, the container export is one of the most useful non-tagging-related tools that the GTM user interface offers.

However, one big misgiving in the feature (until now) has been that exporting just a subset of the container version or workspace has been impossible. It’s always the entire container or nothing. If you wanted to remove parts of the export before importing it to another container, you had to do JSON surgery to the contents, removing all the unnecessary or sensitive items before sharing the export file.

Last updated 27 April 2023 with details about preventing FPID access in cookieless scenarios.

With Server-side tagging, the developer community has a chance to vastly improve the data collection capabilities of Google’s analytics platforms (Universal Analytics and App+Web). The ability to build our own templates is particularly potent with a Server container.

However, it’s not as if Google themselves are just sitting idly by and seeing what the community can come up with.