Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics on Simo Ahava's blog

Setting up cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics 4 has been well-documented.

For many, it seems, one of the most important justifications for server-side Google Tag Manager is its resilience to ad and content blockers.

Google has released the Google Ads Remarketing tag for server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager.

The FPID cookie in server-side tagging for Google Tag Manager is an HttpOnly, server-managed ID cookie that’s designed to replace the JavaScript-managed _ga cookie used by Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics.

One of the biggest blockers for Google Tag Manager’s server-side tagging to slip out of beta is Google Ads.

Since Google Tag Manager released the manual setup guide for server-side tagging, my mind has been spinning with the idea of walking through the deployment into Amazon’s AWS.

Last updated 1 December 2023: New consent signals added Ever since Google Analytics released the first features of consent mode, I’ve been anxiously waiting for news about a more tightly-knit integration with Google’s preferred implementation solution: Go…

This tag adds measurements for Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS), and pushes them into dataLayer once each is collected.

A variable template with which you can access the key-value pairs that were present in the dataLayer.push() that caused the tag to fire.

Important!

This Server container tag template can be used to set (or rewrite) any browser cookie in the HTTP response.

I’ve written about Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 before.

The automatic provisioning process of the Google Tag Manager server-side tagging service is extremely useful.

With server-side tagging, you can send any types of HTTP requests to the Server container.

The URL Parser (Server Container) variable template can be used to parse URL parts out of any URL string passed as input.

Use this Server container template to set up a monitoring system for Google Tag Manager.

Facebook has now officially released their Conversions API tag template for server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager.

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.

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.

There’s a new custom variable template in town!

Use the sha256 Hasher template to generate a SHA256 hash (encoded with base64 or hex) of any input string

One of the largest costs in a server-side tagging can be logging.

This will likely be the shortest blog article I have ever written, but I have just one short thing to say: SIMMER IS LIVE!

This is an unofficial template for the AdForm Tracking Point.

Updated 3 March 2023: Added a checkbox to the template to enable collecting FCP, INP, and TTFB metrics, too..

One of the big omissions, at least for now, in Google Analytics 4 is the customTask.

At one point in the turbulent year of 2020, you might have gasped in surprise when looking at the preview interface of Google Tag Manager.

This tag writes into dataLayer selected default and custom fields set with tags that utilize the gtag.js library; Google Analytics 4, for instance.

For years, I’ve resisted the urge to start a newsletter.

This tag stores the Transaction ID provided by the user in a browser cookie and/or localStorage.

Designed to work with the Transaction ID Logger tag template, this variable template reads Transaction IDs stored in a browser cookie or localStorage.

This variable template takes an Enhanced Ecommerce products/impressions/promotions array as an input, and outputs it in the updated “items” format for Google Analytics 4 Ecommerce.

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-…

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.

On the surface, tracking events in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is fairly simple.

This is an unofficial template for the Facebook Pixel.

This is an unofficial template for AudienceProject’s UserReport tag.

The release of bulk actions in the Google Tag Manager user interface was very welcome.

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

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

Note!

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.

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference in late June this year included a couple of big announcements around Apple’s approach to privacy in their software.

Exporting a container in Google Tag Manager can have many purposes.

A recent update to Google Tag Manager introduced container notifications.

When you create a Server container in Google Tag Manager, GTM creates an App Engine deployment in the Google Cloud Platform for you.

Since the release of Server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager, I’ve jumped at every opportunity to celebrate the tools it provides for improving end-user privacy and data security.

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

You can utilize Server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager to build your own custom Universal Analytics proxy.

When you use Google Analytics on the web, you are most likely implementing one of analytics.js, the global site tag (gtag.js), or Universal Analytics tags via Google Tag Manager.