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 AWS Google Cloud (App Engine): Provision Server-side Tagging Application Manually Azure’s App Service is similar to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and GCP App Engine, in that it lets you create a web application from scratch with minimal effort.

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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 again to say how this is poor justification for using server-side GTM. By circumventing the user’s wish to block scripts, you are disrespecting them and forcing their browser to download scripts that they wanted to avoid downloading in the first place.

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One of the biggest blockers for Google Tag Manager’s server-side tagging to slip out of beta is Google Ads. Until server-side tagging supports a solution for both conversions and remarketing capabilities to be reproduced server-side, it’s unlikely that Server containers will lose their beta label. While I can’t say what will happen to the beta label now, the fact is that Google Tag Manager has now released support for Conversion tracking using server-side tagging.

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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. I personally prefer Google Cloud Platform over AWS, because I think it’s so much more user-friendly. Even though in this guide we’ll be utilizing one of the simplest AWS services, Elastic Beanstalk, the deployment is still much more complex than if you were to use GCP’s App Engine.

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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: Google Tag Manager. In a recent release, Google released a veritable cornucopia of new features that should assist in determining and implementing consent not just across Google tags, but any tags running in the container.

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Last updated: 18 October 2021. Peview works now with the proxied container even if the container ID is overridden.. While server-side tagging already has a wonderful built-in Client for proxying the Google Tag Manager container via your own first-party domain, it’s not perfect. The main issues are that it doesn’t let you delimit access on a per-origin basis, so requests for the allowlisted container IDs can be sent from anywhere, and that it doesn’t let you freely choose the path via which the container ID is loaded.

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I’ve written about Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 before. It’s a verification API, which analyzes the signals fed into it and returns a bot score, based on how “bot-like” the hits are. It’s a great way to validate whether or not to collect data from certain sources that exhibit bot-like behavior. You’ll want to ignore those in your analytics tools, for example, as they tend to add a lot of (unrealistic) noise to the data set.

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