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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. For more details about the cookie itself, check out my previous article on FPID. In that article, I mentioned one caveat for adopting … Read more

Google has released the Google Ads Remarketing tag for server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager. Functionally, it’s remarkably similar to the Conversion Tracking tag they released previously. In fact, you should go ahead and read that article first, so that you have an understanding of how Google Ads tracking works through Server containers! Follow this … Read more

For many, it seems, one of the most important justifications for server-side Google Tag Manager is its resilience to ad and content blockers. After all, by virtue of serving the container JavaScript from your own domain, you escape many of the heuristic devices today’s blocker technologies employ. Well, I’ve gone on record over and over … Read more

Setting up cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics 4 has been well-documented. The main departure from Universal Analytics is how cross-domain measurement is something you configure through the Google Analytics user interface rather than through implementation and JavaScript. While this approach is obviously beneficial especially for those who lack the know-how or the resources to configure … Read more

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. For my previous guides on manually provisioning a Server container, follow these links: Amazon AWS (Elastic Beanstalk): Deploy Server-side Google Tag Manager In … Read more

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. Naturally, the most common use case for server-side tags is to map the incoming requests to the Server container (filtered through Clients) and dispatch them to their respective endpoints. But … Read more

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. There are plenty of excellent browser extensions for helping you debug, and we’ll discuss these in the guide, too. But most of … Read more

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. You can set it up in Amazon AWS (this blog) You can set it up in Microsoft Azure (this blog) You can set … Read more

OK, that’s one unappealing title for a blog post, but rest assured that the content more than makes up for this obscurity. Recently, my favorite toy in the world, Google Tag Manager’s server container, introduced the capability to handle asynchronous operations in variables. This is done through a JavaScript interface known as Promise. A Promise … Read more

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 … Read more