Google Tag Manager Server-side Tagging Tutorial - what it is, setup, and more

google tag manager has recently introduced a brand new feature which is called server side tracking if you want to learn what it is why you should use that what are the benefits what are the drawbacks i will explain all of that in this video [Music] hey my name is julius and this is analytics mania youtube channel where you can learn google tag manager and google analytics in 2020 google tech manager added a new layer of complexity but also possibilities in tag management in the older days you could just activate your tracking codes i mean javascript on the website and those codes do the heavy lifting when it comes to measuring your site and also collecting user data but now you can also send the data from your website to a certain server where google tag manager's virtual instance is loaded and then from there you can send that data further to tools like google analytics facebook ads and so on if you're wondering why would you need this at all i will show you in this video so without further ado let's dive in first let's take a look at the usual way how people are using google tag manager so you have a website and on that website you implement google tag manager within the google tag manager container let's say that you have implemented a universal analytics or let's say apple's web tag that will track certain interactions on a website so when the tag is activated it automatically prepares some data but also it captures some additional information that is available on the page like what kind of browser is that what is the browser window size and so on when that data is prepared then it is sent to google analytics directly to google analytics servers and this is the usual url at least the part of the url where that request is actually sent so this is google analytics dot com then slash collect sometimes it is let's say slash r slash collect or something else so with this request the tag also attaches some additional parameters that are later sent to google analytics and google analytics then parses that information and you see that data as hits page views events and so on in your reports so all of this entire blog is happening client side or in other words in the browser because all of this is happening with help of tags javascript that is a little bit on your site and so on now with server side tracking google tag manager the concept looks different so let's take a look you have a website and on that website let's say once again you load your google tag manager container now i'm talking right now about the regular website container then in that container you activate your google analytics tag that also catches some information about the user about the interaction and so on but then it sends the data not directly to google analytics but to your cloud instance where you are hosting another type of google tag manager container which is called server side container and you can also configure that container to work under your own domain so in this case the request is sent not to a third party domain but on your own domain of course the subdomain is different but in this case what happens is that this is still happening in the first party context and then when this data is sent to your cloud google tag manager based on your configurations let's say the data is processed and eventually that is sent to you google analytics server right here so right now what happens is that this part is still happening in your browser client side then it is sent to your cloud server right here and then in the cloud server data is processed and further sent to google analytics so you might be thinking like okay i kind of get the concept and the idea but why would you need this why is this so important and so valuable for marketing for analytics and so on so let's take a look at some benefits so one of the benefits is that you can reduce the load on your page performance because one of the main offenders that affect the page loading speed in a negative way are third party javascript libraries let's say facebook pixel google analytics or gtag or whatever i mean not only facebook and google but basically any javascript library that does a lot of work in the background it affects how your website pages are loading so if you want to reduce that you can load some custom let's say minimized libraries that just collect certain information send it to your server and then in your server you do all the data processing and send it further to google analytics or other tools but but keep in mind that this requires some customization so in some cases it still might make sense to load certain jobs libraries but in other case for example you can just send one hit a payload to your server side setup and then in that server side setup you can split the same data request and send it to one vendor to another vendor to another vendor and so on so instead of having five different scripts loaded on your site you can load one library one script and that script will then send data to your server i mean to your server side of google tag manager and that gtm instance will then do the heavy lifting and split and send the data to other vendors and that way you are not adding a lot of load on your visitors browsers then another benefit is that you can't control what kind of data is sent to vendors because when you load third party javascript on your site it not only tracks what you are thinking it does but also that code might do some additional things in the background like you know fingerprinting collecting a lot of data about the visitor trying to access cookies and all the other stuff so in this case what you have is that once you send some data to your google tag manager server side container then that container can be configured to send only certain data points like what is the user id what is the browser what is let's see what was the event was the interaction and that is it so things like fingerprinting or other privacy intruding features are very limited and because of that you can reduce the risk of pii leaks pii stands for personally identifiable information so first of all if some personal identifiable information is available somewhere on the side scripts i mean javascript codes can accidentally or maybe intentionally capture that information and send it to their own servers but with help of server-side tracking you can actually configure your server-side container take certain things and then send it to vendors like google analytics and so on so if you are very conscious about your user's privacy then this is definitely a benefit then you can reduce the impact of ad blockers because there are many ad blockers that are blocking requests to let's say google analytics.com where usually the tags are sending data so if you are sending information to not google analytics.com but let's say to your own sub domain of the server side container then probably most of the ad blockers i actually haven't played around with that a lot but probably most of the ad blockers will not block that request then you can also extend the quick expiration on safari so this is important because of the itp because if you are not familiar with it in a nutshell itp is a tracking prevention solution by safari that limits the lifetime of cookies that were created by javascript that is loaded on your website so if let's say google analytics tracking code loads on your website and sets a cookie that cookie is set to expire after seven days but there are also some other let's say nuances and probably they will change even more in the future but if a cookie is set from the server side then that cookie gets a regular normal lifetime span so with server side tracking google tag manager you can also achieve this by extending the lifetime of cookies another benefit although it's probably smaller than the previous ones is that you can for example also find things like spam in google analytics because when you send the data to server side container you can also configure it to accept the data only if the data is actually coming from your own endpoint rather than you know just randomly sent to your google analytics property also if you have some sensitive information like api keys and you want to use them in google tag manager if you use them let's say in regular google doc manager container i'm talking about web container anyone could actually see what kind of api keys are stored in your container if you are publicly using them in things like custom html tags or javascript variables or whatever but usually custom html tags so with server side containers you can avoid this issue because you can just send some data to your server side container and in the server side container you can store your api keys and no one from the outside will be able to access and know what kind of keys are stored there so this is also a good improvement regarding security and these benefits are not the only ones that are introduced by the server-side tracking in google tech manager there are more and if you want to learn more about them you can learn that in cmo how's blog post i will post a link to it below the video that one is very extensive so if you want to learn more about technical details you can definitely check that out because the goal of this video is to give you a broad overview of what it is a beginner's introduction to the concept of server-side tracking and since we have talked about some benefits there are some drawbacks as well so let's take a look at them too first of all this is a paid solution i mean the gtm itself and the gtm server side container is still free so this is all good and there are no plans to make it paid but you need to host that server side container somewhere and that can be done in google cloud at least right now and guess what you need to pay for that google cloud services and another drawback is that this is not for everyone this requires even more technical knowledge so if you were quiet struggling with the usual website tracking with google tag manager and you were you know stuck with all these technical terms there are even more things that you need to know about server side tracking therefore the rabbit hole becomes even deeper or maybe if your company doesn't have people who are strong in analytics slash marketing and in the technical topics maybe server side google tag management container is just one more reason why you should hire someone who is strong with analytics development topics all right so this was a theoretical introduction right now let's dive into the actual configuration and see what can we do and what should we do so here's the overview of the process that we are going to follow so first of all we will need to create a new type of google tag manager container which is called server side container and automatically we will also need to host it on a cloud project so we will host it in google cloud platform then we will need to configure the server side container so we will need to create tags triggers variables can be created but in this example we will not do that also you will need to create a new thing which is called client so this is a new concept and i will introduce it quite soon then we will need to send the data to the server side container so from your website to the server side and there are several options how we can do that you can send it with the regular website container of google tech manager you can configure your gtag code snippet on your website but this is probably done by a developer or you can have some custom code on your website that can do that but i mean this one is very technical and since i'm a gtm guy so i will show you how to use the first option which is just sent from the website container of gtm to the server side gtm and then send it to let's say google analytics and eventually we will need to of course test it and check it so without further ado let's dive in here i am in google tag manager to get started with server side tracking first you need to create a server side container so one of the ways how to create that is to go to the admin section then click on the plus icon in the container column click it and then at the list of target platforms you will see server so this is the server side container type that you should choose right now it is in beta sometime in the future it will not be and you can name it whatever you want i'll give it some name that clearly represents that this is a server side container okay so this looks like obvious enough and now let's create the container itself once you do that the configuration process of the container is a different one if you compare to the regular website tracking so when you create a container you need to host it somewhere and in this case it can be hosted on a google cloud platform therefore you should keep using the automatically provision tagging server and click this button right here if you don't have any experience or i don't know if you have never worked with the google cloud platform before you will not have any billing accounts therefore you need to create a new one so create a billing account right here and then you will be asked to enter your certain information so right now i will pause this video and continue it after i have completed the setup of this billing account now i have created my billing account i have entered credit card information because google cloud requires that upfront but don't worry you will not be charged because there is also a free trial a generous free trial with probably 300 of credit but still just keep in mind that you will not be charged right away as you start using or just at least play around around with the google tag manager server side container so once you create that billing account you will see that in the list right here and it will be by default selected then click this select billing account and create server and once you click this it will take a while probably let's say a minute maybe less maybe more but this will definitely not be something that will end within several seconds so you should be patient so right now i will pause the video and we'll continue when this loading process ends all right so the container is now created we see some information such as project id in the google cloud platform we also see the default url and some other information so right now we can try to configure our first setup and see how things are working so you can close this window for now if you want to reopen it once again you can find it by clicking this container id link right here but first of all let's take a look at the setup so if you want to get some data into google tag magic container and start working with it first you need to catch it and you can catch it with a thing called client so if you go to clients section in your google tag manager container you will see that there are already two pre-created clients right here one is for the universal analytics and one is for the app plus web now if you're wondering like what the hell is client in google tag manager server side container let's take a look you have a website and on that website you load a regular google doc management container which is website container and then that google tag manager container loads google analytics on your site and that particular tag of ga will prepare some data that your gtm container is pushing it into it but also it will automatically fetch some information like you know what kind of browser is that what is the size of the screen and so on so when that information is taken all of this is happening on the client side so this is what is happening in the browser then we want to send that data to the server side google tag manager container so from the client side we are sending it to the server side when we are doing that something needs to actually take those requests and accept them and that can be done with help of a client so if you want to send let's say data from your website and that data is google analytics and you want to process that data in your server-side container that data can be accepted by the google analytics client in the container when this is done then the tag is fired so the main purpose of the client is to listen and wait for the incoming http requests to come in from let's say this tag from the client side to the server side and then unify that data and make it more let's say standardized based on on the event model that is in the server side google tag manager container then that data can be accessed by tags by variables and when this tag is activated then that tag sends the data further to google analytics servers but this is a very simplified explanation because even if we're using clients there is still a trigger between them and we'll take a look how we can do that in a minute or so and since we are dealing with the google analytics setup right now i mean we want to send the google analytics page view from a certain website to google analytics property but we want to do that with server side setup so we don't need to create a new client right here because we are already using it and if you want you can click it and you can see what can be done right here by default no need to configure anything right here but of course if you want you can for example change the priority for example if you have multiple universal analytics clients in your setup because i don't know maybe you need that for some reason and you want a certain to get a higher priority you can change the number right here the higher the number the higher the priority but in the case of this basic setup we don't need to do any configurations right here what we actually need to do right here is we need to create a tag that will send the data that was received by the client and that data will be sent further to google analytics servers so let's go to tags go to new tag configuration and right now as i'm recording this video there are only three tag templates right here but once again the community template gallery is coming soon for the server side containers so don't worry i'm pretty sure that this will grow quite fast because for example the same happened with the custom tag templates and custom variable templates in the regular website google tag magic containers when everything started pretty small but right now if you take a look you will see a bunch of i know dozens of various templates that can make your work faster or more convenient but right now since i want to send the data with the universal analytics tag i can just click it and what will happen right here is that if you don't do any configurations right here then this tag will just take every data point that was captured by the universal analytics client and we'll just take it further and send it to the actual google analytics but if you want to override something you can do that for example maybe you want to add some additional field maybe you want to edit i know client id or something else you can or maybe you want to take that incoming request and send it to another google analytics account instead you can just change let's say the tracking id right here and then this setting will overwrite the request it will replace the older google analytics id with the new one that you enter it right here but we are not doing that instead what we want to do is that we want to configure a trigger so basically a condition when this tag will fire if you are already familiar with the concept of tags triggers and variables in google tag manager in general this is pretty much the same thing however there are some differences for example in triggering if we click it you will see that there are no built-in triggers so for example no all page views or whatever trigger and if you go to create a new trigger right now only one trigger type is available and that is custom so with this trigger what we want to do is that we want to fire a tag when a request is sent to the universal analytics client that is already created in this container and in this case we don't want to fire the trigger on all events because maybe you know this container will get data related to facebook pixel or i don't know maybe some google ads maybe something else so we don't want to fire the trigger on all the possible requests we want to fire a trigger only on those requests that are related to the universal analytics class i mean when the data is actually captured by that particular client so we need to enter some events and then we need to choose the variables right now we have only one variable which is event name but that is not the variable that we want to use we need to choose another built-in variable that is related to the client but for some reason that doesn't work for me maybe that's a bug well this is still in beta so we need to enable the built-in variables right here so we go to variables and then in the built-in variable since you click configure and enable the variable that is called client name so that way we will be able to filter out certain requests and work only with the requests that were handled by a certain client so let's go to tags and i quickly will do the same thing so new tag universal analytics then in triggering let's create a new trigger which is custom event type and let's choose some events where client name equals to universal analytics now why am i entering it like that well because that's the name of the client that is available in this container i will show you what i mean right now let's just create a trigger so we can enter it like that i don't use the trigger type because right now that's just only one trigger type so mentioning the trigger type and the url seems quite redundant so in this trigger we used the universal analytics client name and we know the client name because if we go to the client's list of this container you will see that the name of the client is exactly universal analytics i'm talking about this client right here so the name is universal analytics and we created a trigger that is using the condition which is if the client name equals to universal analytics then our tag will fire actually this is not a good name for a tag in the server side container because right now this tag will be sending not only page views but basically it will be transferring all the possible requests that were sent and that were handled by the universal analytics client and then it was send it further to the actual google analytics server so in this case basically we can call it universal analytics tag like that now if we take a look at this diagram once again what we have done so far is that we have a client and that client was automatically created when we created a gtm server side container now we have created a tag and that tag will send the data to ga every time the universal analytics client captures some data and then handles it now what we need to do is we need to somehow send the data from the website to our server side container and we can do that in several ways one of them is with gtag other option is with some custom code and also we can do that with the website container of google tag manager so the website container is added to the website and we can configure that to send the data from the website to your cloud instance in the google cloud platform so out of those three options i will choose the gtm option right now that is why i'm now in another container which type is website so this is the usual container that you are used to working with in google tag manager so this is the web container and in this container i have one tag which is ga pageview so every time a page loads so on all pages this tag will fire by default this tag sends the data to the official google analytics endpoint which is google dash analytics.com but right now there is an option to change that endpoint and we can actually configure the tag to send the data not to the official endpoint but to our server side containers endpoint and we can do that either on the tag level right here or we can actually do that on the g settings variable level and then all the tags that use this variable will be using the same custom endpoint that you defined and this is exactly what i am going to do so i am going to variables then i go to g settings variable i edit the variable i enter more settings then advanced configuration and there is a field called transport url so if you enter some custom url right here your ga tags will be sending requests to that particular url so right now what we need to do is that we need to somehow get the url of that endpoint and we can do that by going to google tag manager server side container clicking on the container id copying the url right here copy and paste it right here click save now we need to test this setup and layer i will show you also how to work with your own custom domain because right now when these requests are sent to the somethingsomethingappspot.com these are still considered as requests to third-party resources and and this is happening in the third-party context but if you want to not be affected by various privacy enhancements that plugins and browsers offer it will be always highly recommended to you know use your own sub domain for tracking like this first of all if you want to debug the server side container you need to enable the preview mode right here and it will open a new tab that tab contains your endpoints urls and some parameters like your container id and so on it looks quite similar to the regular google tag magic preview and debug mode that you are working with on your website but in this case there is no website there is just this container and every time a request is sent to your google tag manager container i mean the server side container you will start seeing the requests right here so this is part of the testing setup now we need to enable the preview and debug mode in our client side container then we will be able to activate our page view tag that tag will send the data to the client side container and we will start seeing something right here so enable the preview mode in your client side google tag manager container and once you see the orange banner appear right here go to the website where that container is implemented and refresh the page and here you see that the page view tag has fired that that tag sent the data to another url right here we can actually even check the network tab so let's let me just quickly paste this part in the network tab and then i refresh the page once again and we see that the data was sent to the collect endpoint of our domain and if you go to our server side containers debug mode you will see that there are two page views i have two pages because i refresh the page twice you will probably see once and then if you click the tag you will see what kind of data was sent from your server side container to actually google analytics you can also go to the variables tab but right now i don't have many variables enabled right here only event name that is enabled by default and client name that i have enabled also you can go to the event tab and you will see what kind of data was sent from your client-side container to your server-side container and what kind of data is available what kind of information was processed by your universal analytics client in the server side container and finally if we go to google analytics and we want to check whether the data was actually sent to ga we can see that in real time reports in fact i can go to let's see another website like i don't know checkout which is page id 46 and we see that another page view occurred and if i go to analytics we see that the new page view is sent to google analytics now another thing that we need to do and that i have mentioned already in this video is that this is very recommended you need to use not google's tracking domains when you're using server side setup i mean don't use the appspot.com i mean this entire domain instead it is highly recommended that you use your own subdomain because then all those requests that you will be sending to server side will be in the first party context and with the increasing number of various privacy initiatives among browsers and plugins and so on this is very much recommended so to connect your own domain you need to go to console.cloud.google.com and then when you log in you need to choose your own project and in this case click on this project name right here switch to all because most likely your gtm project will be hiding in this section choose it and then you need to go to the app engine section go to settings and go to custom domains and click add custom domain then you need to enter a custom domain that you want to use so in this case i'm going to use a new one and i will enter it right here click verify and then you will be asked to add a certain verification text to your domain settings in order to actually verify that you are the owner so right now i'm actually using cloudflare i don't see it right here so i'll just choose other and i will need to copy this code and go to my cloudflare settings where i can add the settings for this particular domain in my cloudflare setting so if you're working with cloudflare you need to choose a domain which you want to connect to google cloud platform and then go to dns and enter a new record which is txt then enter the name of the subdomain that you want to create specifically for your server side container so in my case that subdomain is measure you can use whatever you want ssgtm sgtm tracking or something else analytics.somethingsomething.com and so on and then in the context you need to paste that particular value that you copied from this page and then click save what's good with cloudflare is that you can then verify the subdomain almost instantly so great i have already verified my subdomain now let's go back to the cloud platform and continue configuration i click refresh domains i see the success message then i click continue then can keep only the measure sub domain i don't need the www dot measure so i just remove that one keep one and then save mappings then click continue and then i am asked to add eight dns records to that subdomain right now i will just show you how to enter this record and this record but keep in mind that actually in the background while i have passed this video i have entered all eight records right here so let's start with the first one type a then the name of my subdomain and then the value like this then i disable proxy status save so this means that i have chosen only dns configuration as an option and i'm not using the cloudflare proxy in this case and let's do the same thing but with this record as well choose aaa measure and then this one also disable cloudflare's proxy i mean if you're using some other provider of course the interface will be different but i mean cloudflare is very popular so just keep that in mind and right now i will pause the video and i will create the rest of the six records so you should do the same thing as well all right so now i have created all eight records in cloudflare then i click done and then you will see that your custom domain is created now the next thing to do is that we need to install google doc manager server side container that the new endpoint the new default url is this one not the one that we got by default from google tag manager so we copy this domain right here we go to google tag manager server side container go to admin then container settings and then we change the tagging server url like this make sure that the url does not end with slash and also include the https protocol and click save also you should now go to your g settings variable and update the transport url as well so click variables then open your g settings variable right here and change the transport url from the previous one which is appspa.com with a lot of subdomains to this one and of course once again no slash at the end and https must be present in the beginning click save and let's see what happens so refresh the preview out of the client side container then let's i don't know if you need to refresh but it's always a good practice i guess you need to refresh the server side container looks like there are too many redirects and there are some issues so probably i am just trying to use this too soon after i have configured the custom domain in the cloud platform so i will need to wait a little more okay so now i have waited like for five more minutes and the preview mode is now working so i jax actually had to click the preview button once again and the preview appeared right here then let's test whether everything is working properly after we have changed the domain so let me just go to the website i refresh the page i see that the pageview tag has fired the page view was received by my universal analytics client in the server side container i can click it i can see that the request was sent to google analytics and in ga realtime reports i see that very same page view right here so page id 46 is the same as page id 46 right here so it looks like everything is working properly one more thing that you need to keep in mind is that what i have done so far in this video i was doing that on a test server which is well more than enough for playing around and testing but if you want to you know start working with server-side tracking on actual like live websites with more traffic test servers are not enough so we need to upgrade your app engine in your google cloud platform to the flexible plan or flexible environment i don't know how to call that so that one will cost you probably at least 40 dollars a month per server and it's recommended to use at least three servers reduce the risk of data loss in case there is i don't know some server outage or something like that in this video i will not dive deeper into that part because i think that this video is already pretty long and i just wanted to give you more like a general overview of how things work and like the general idea of how to configure things so if you want to learn more about how to upgrade your server from the testing server to the flexible plan or flexible environment but if you actually want to learn more about this process i will post the link below the video to see mohawk's video where he teaches how to upgrade your test server to that flexible plan so now that we have configured our first setup of the server side container let's talk about some concerns and other things that you should keep in mind first if you think that this changes everything and that your current google tag manager knowledge of website tracking is just going to the trash bin you are not correct this server side setup does not replace your regular google tag manager tracking so if you are willing to track what is happening on the website you will still very much need to understand how your website container works how your tags triggers variables work how data layer works in google tag manager and so on but if you want to take some things to the next level or if you for example dealing with some large clients with some large projects then definitely you will need to add another level of complexity which is google tag manager server side so basically server side is a way how to enhance your data collection and that is added above your current existing setup of website tracking so if you don't know right now whether to start learning about the regular website tracking the answer is that you should and i have a bunch of videos and blog posts and courses about that so if you want to learn more go to analyticsmana.com and start diving into that then with the growing popularity of the server-side tracking the number of shady and bad actors will probably also increase because with all of these possibilities also some options for you know hiding some nasty things also increases for example some website owners still can track a lot of data about visitors do some fingerprinting and all the other stuff then that data can be sent in the first party context to their google tech manager server side container and no one from the outside can possibly know what is happening in that server because that is not for the public and that's where you know some shady things can can definitely happen but with some progress there's definitely some risk of shady actors and in this case i would say that progress and the benefit of the progress is better and outweighs the risk of shady actors and hopefully i don't know maybe in the future those shady actors will be mitigated in some other way then another thing that you should keep in mind is that if you implement server side tracking this does not make you automatically gppr or ccpa or whatever compliant because those regulations are not about the technology that is used those regulations are about the consent about the data that is collected about the personal data so it doesn't matter if you're using you know javascript or and only javascript i mean the client side or if you're doing only server side that doesn't matter you still need to get the consent and you need to abide those rules so just keep in mind that server-side tracking is not some magical solution that makes you you know automatically compliant because it doesn't then another thing to keep in mind is that the debugging will be more difficult especially if you're just you know pitching someone maybe you're just starting to work with someone because when everything is happening client-side you can use plug-ins you know like google tag assistant or ga debugger or whatever and you can use those plugins to see the possible problems and this can actually help to show your expertise and to pitch new clients but in this case all you can do is just you can just see what kind of request is sent from the website to somewhere and in fact it will be more difficult to find which exact request is sent to server side container and even if you identify that request you will not be able to see what is happening in the server i mean in the cloud instance that is loading the server-side google doc match container because that is behind the wall you cannot check this unless you get access to to that particular you know google tag manager container and in sometimes especially in the beginning of project that might be a challenge then another thing you should keep in mind is that this is still in beta and i'm recording this video in august of 2020 so this means that you know more features will be added some things might change so don't rush to build everything on this setup right away in your production environments but you should still keep in mind and follow this this topic because it will definitely grow in popularity and you know if you want to stay in the band you should at least know the concept and like why is it useful or why is it not useful in some cases to use then if you're just starting to learn google tag manager like at all i mean you're just a beginner in gtm don't dive into server side tracking because that will be suicide your knowledge gap will be too large first you need to understand how in general website tracking works and that is perfectly enough to do that with the regular website tracking with google tag manager but i still recommend that you should get familiar with the concept of server side tracking and keep an eye on it first of all i mean maybe some of your clients will notice that you know people are buzzing around with this you know buzzword which is server-side and they might ask you like what it is like do we need that when we will need that that is why i think that you should at least know like the general idea and also maybe start preparing yourself but also tell your clients like hey this is something that we might implement in the future but let's wait while this exits you know beta status or maybe we need to do something else to prepare for that and the final thing that i wanted to talk about like very quickly is like what is waiting in the future so if you're asking yourself should you jump into this right now in 2020 and should you implement the server-side tracking on your website or maybe on your client's website in production environment the answer is no because once again this is still in beta there are some features that are missing there are not a lot of templates talking about client templates stack templates but since there will also be community gallery i think that maybe within six months maybe within a year we will definitely see some improvements and new possibilities and i believe that this feature will become more accessible for marketers and analysts in the near future when you know more things will be introduced by google tag manager team and by the community then if you want to keep up the pace of all of the things that are happening in the industry because the speed of changes is increasing uh you should add more technical things to your you know to learn list which is probably never ending and in this case you should get familiar with how http requests are working also it is valuable to get at least a fundamental understanding of how google cloud platform works and actually these are two topics that i am currently digging into myself as well and finally i think that many small and medium businesses will still not use server side because first of all it might introduce some expenses and for probably small businesses they might not see the benefit in all of this setup because i've read simo howe's blog post and he said that his blog hosted on server side would cost probably around like 120 euros which is like 130 140 bucks something like that per month and knowing that there are many small business owners who are you know not willing to invest in a regular google analytics setup so i'm pretty sure that they will not dive into the server side train as well but the larger the project the larger the impact of things like itp uh then i will definitely think that you know businesses will start understanding the the possible benefit and they might join this bandwagon and try to actually implement the server side on their project on their websites and so on so in a nutshell like to sum up you should keep an eye on server side tracking because there are definitely some things coming in the future i hope that now you have a better understanding and a general idea of what server side tracking in google tag manager is and why you should use that or at least why you might need it in some project in the future obviously this is not for everyone especially having in mind that you have to pay for cloud services which is kind of obvious but i mean just need to keep in mind but if you want to control what kind of data output is sent to third-party vendors if you want to improve your page performance and if you're not afraid of getting even more technical then definitely consider using server side or at least give it a shot so are you excited about this new update or are you going to keep using the regular just client side tracking with google tag manager let me know in the comments if you found this video useful hit the thumbs up button below the video because it helps me continue working on this channel and that's just how youtube algorithm works also consider subscribing to this channel if you want to get more tips like this one in the future my name is julius this is analytics mania and i'll see you in the next [Music] video [Music] you

Channel: Analytics Mania - Google Tag Manager & Analytics

Views: 50,649

Keywords: google tag manager, digital analytics, google tag manager tutorial, google analytics, google tag manager server-side, server-side google tag manager, server-side tracking, google tag manager server container, google cloud platform, server-side tagging, gtm server-side, server-side tagging in google tag manager, google tag manager custom domain, google tag manager client, google tag manager server client, introduction to server-side tagging, introduction to server-side tracking

Id: XUGZMYyoDOY

Length: 44min 45sec (2685 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020