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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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With asynchronous variables recently released in server-side Google Tag Manager, it’s time to dig into data enrichment flows using another release from the Google team. * drum roll * We have a new Google Cloud Platform API! It’s fast. It’s sleek. It’s beautiful. It’s Firestore! Firestore is a NoSQL, transactional, and scalable database that offers near-real-time write/read and sync operations for data. In practice, it’s a great way to enrich and widen the data that you pass through your Server container.

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