Simo Ahava's blog

In this article, I’ll try to clarify the understandably murky Measurement Protocol functionality in Google Analytics 4.

Measurement Protocol is a way to send events to Google Analytics 4 directly from a machine capable of sending HTTP requests (such as a web server). It’s an alternative collection method to the client-side libraries of Google Tag and the Firebase SDK.

Measurement Protocol in GA4 is very different from its predecessor in Universal Analytics. In Universal Analytics, Measurement Protocol was the collection mechanism, with the same protocol being used for both client-side library hits and server-to-server hits.

In this article, I’ll try to clarify the understandably murky Measurement Protocol functionality in Google Analytics 4.

Measurement Protocol is a way to send events to Google Analytics 4 directly from a machine capable of sending HTTP requests (such as a web server). It’s an alternative collection method to the client-side libraries of Google Tag and the Firebase SDK.

Measurement Protocol in GA4 is very different from its predecessor in Universal Analytics. In Universal Analytics, Measurement Protocol was the collection mechanism, with the same protocol being used for both client-side library hits and server-to-server hits.

This is a guest post by Sebastian Pospischil, Evangelist Digital Analytics at TRKKN. All credit for the solution goes to him. The Summary section is the only one authored by Simo Ahava.

You know the deal.

Each and every day, clients reach out to you asking for custom click tracking for this call-to-action on that slider, or that button in this section of a page. They reach out to you because such things cannot be answered out of the box in Google Analytics 4.

If you recall, in February 2019, Apple published a post on the WebKit blog, which introduced version 2.1 of their Intelligent Tracking Prevention browser mechanism.

In this version, Safari (and soon all WebKit browsers, including browser apps on iOS and iPadOS) placed an expiration limit on browser cookies set with JavaScript. It was no longer possible to set the expiration date further than 7 days in the future.

In a recent 2022 release (I don’t have the exact date or version number), WebKit has now modified this mechanism to no longer set an expiration cap on JavaScript cookies.

I have been a strong supporter of server-side tagging, in particular Google’s server-side tag management solution.

I admire the way it seeks to readjust the balance of control that typically has been in favor of the marketing vendors whose JavaScript libraries have been free to wreak havoc in the user’s browser.

By inserting a buffer between the user and the vendor, the owner of the server-side tagging setup can take control over what data the marketing vendors can actually process of the user.

This is a guest post – the first one in a long time! The foreword and summary are written by me, Simo, and the rest is by my esteemed guest author.

How fortunate was I to have been contacted by Arben Kqiku, Digital Marketing & Data Manager from comtogether. Arben is one of our many Simmer students, and he’s walked through the Query GA4 Data In Google BigQuery course, learning a lot along the way.

With the sunset announcement of the Universal Analytics service, it certainly does seem like a waste of time to write articles about it.

However, a recent update to Google Tag Manager is an interesting one and should provide relief to those Google Analytics users who are set on double-tagging their sites for both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 and who want to make use of GA4’s new Data Layer schema.

In this article, I’ll do a quick overview of what the new Use GA4 Schema option does in Google Tag Manager’s Universal Analytics tags (found under Ecommerce settings).

For the longest time, Google has been working towards consolidation of their products to build a unified tagging platform.

Products that are instrumented (or associated) with “tags” would fall under this umbrella. These comprise tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, Google Optimize, and, of course, Google Analytics.

If you’ve been peeking under the hood, you might have noticed how all the tools listed above already run through the gtag.js library. This Global Site Tag has slowly but surely become the de facto client library used by Google’s tagging platforms on the web.

With certain types of HTTP requests, the web browser might first dispatch a request with the OPTIONS method, also known as a preflight request.

The purpose of the preflight request is to “check” with the web server that it’s equipped to handle the type of cross-origin request the browser wants to dispatch.

If the server doesn’t handle this preflight request, or if it returns a response that doesn’t agree with what the web browser wants to actually dispatch, the check fails and the browser refuses to send the actual request.

Server-side Google Tag Manager has an excellent Preview mode, which lets you inspect incoming requests, monitor the event data object, view console messages, and identify outgoing requests, among other things.

To enable this Preview mode on the web, you simply need to click the Preview button in the container, after which any requests sent from the same browser instance will be automatically shown in the Preview mode window.

However, what about if you want to send requests from another browser? Or from a non-browser data source? Or what if you want to play with XHR or Fetch without having access to cookie credentials?

Seven years ago, I wrote on my former employer’s (the amazing Reaktor) blog a tongue-in-the-cheek article titled 10 Truths About Data.

Looking back on it today, I’m still proud of the handiwork, but I can’t help but think that some of the truths were wasted just to reach the magic number 10.

So, today, I want to revisit these truths and provide a rehashed version for you, my dear reader.

You might cynically think that this article is just a way for me to prevent having the first month in this blog’s history with no new articles published. And you would be partially right.

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