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

Google Tag Manager has a new, AI-powered feature.

There’s a somewhat understated feature in the Google Tag Manager Community Template Gallery, which should certainly prove useful, especially to template authors.

Thanks to Giovani Ortolani Barbosa for reminding me about this possibility within Google Tag Manager and thus inspiring this blog post.

In preparation for the upcoming major integration between Google Tag and Google Tag Manager, Google has rolled out some user interface changes to your GTM containers.

UPDATED 20 March 2026: Shortly after publishing this article, Google Cloud changed how Load Balancer frontend certificate management works.

Server-side Google Tag Manager is essentially a server application (running on Node.js), which Google has helpfully composed into a Docker image.

On June 30, 2025, Google announced that they are consolidating how Google’s script libraries for the web (e.g. gtm.js and gtag.js) are loaded when using a server-side Google Tag Manager container.

This is a guest post by Jude Nwachukwu Onyejekwe.

Google’s Consent Mode is a way to control how tags react to the user’s consent for different tracking purposes.

Google Tag Manager users received an email on March 11th, where Google announced a very cryptic update to Google Tag Manager: As is typical with Google’s email communications, the email raised more questions than it answered.

One of the most popular use cases for server-side Google Tag Manager, often shared on this blog, too, is to split an incoming stream into multiple different endpoints.

There are many reasons why you might want to duplicate your tags (or triggers, or variables, or templates) in Google Tag Manager.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to add first-party cookie values client-side, which your server-side Google Tag Manager processes can then access.

There are two new custom templates available in server-side Google Tag Manager.

Piwik PRO has two new server-side Google Tag Manager templates, and this article explains what they are and how they work.

Google has released a new feature, First-Party Mode (FPM), into public beta.

If you’re using server-side Google Tag Manager, Google (Advanced) Consent Mode and you’re collecting hits to Google Analytics 4, you might have noticed something odd happening when switching consent to granted state.

This will be a quick tip, but it’s here to correct my previous statements in the comments section of different articles on this blog.

Simmer has just released the Technical Marketing Handbook.

**Last updated March 7, 2024.

As my LinkedIn inbox graciously reminded me that I’ve been working on Simmer for a full three years now, I’d like to share a couple of observations about education – particularly in the world of technical digital marketing.

This is a template for deploying Google tags’ Consent Mode functionality.

I am fortunate to share another guest post by Arben Kqiku, Digital Analyst at Assura.

In a recent update to server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager, Google switched the default deployment of a server-side tagging backend from Google App Engine to Google Cloud Run.

Google is going all-in with Google Tag.

One of the big pain points in configuring Google Analytics 4 through Google Tag Manager has been the difficulty of setting up event parameters, user properties, and settings across a range of tags.

Today marks the date of exactly 10 years of marriage to my wife, my friend, the loving mother to our children, and my business partner at Simmer.

Content warning: introspection, parenthood, “Floating Butt”.

In January 2020, when Google Tag Manager’s server-side tagging was first introduced to the general public at SuperWeek, I wrote a flurry of tweets, sharing my vision of a server-side tagging future.

I owe my career to Google Analytics.

The FPID cookie is what server-side Google Tag Manager would prefer to use for your Google Analytics 4 tracking.

Server-side tagging is all about control.

While Measurement Protocol for GA4 is still rather, well, rough, it can be used to augment existing collection quite nicely.

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

This is a guest post by Sebastian Pospischil, Evangelist Digital Analytics at TRKKN.

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.

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

This is a guest post – the first one in a long time!

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

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

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

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.

If you want to manually install server-side Google Tag Manager on App Engine in the Google Cloud Platform, you are of course welcome to do so.

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!

OK, that’s one unappealing title for a blog post, but rest assured that the content more than makes up for this obscurity.

While Google App Engine, the default implementation pattern of server-side Google Tag Manager, is straightforward to setup with the automatic provisioning steps, it’s certainly not the only way to deploy the server.

One of the key skills for anyone working with web analytics and tag management is understanding how to identify where things went wrong, why they went wrong, and ideally how to fix them.

Although most of Server-side Tagging in Google Tag Manager revolves, quite rightfully, around Clients, there’s still plenty of value to be derived from tags, too.

To continue my extensive collection of Google Tag Manager’s server-side tagging articles, in this guide I’ll walk you through how to set up a Server container in Microsoft Azure’s App Service platform.