Piwik PRO has two new server-side Google Tag Manager templates, and this article explains what they are and how they work. The first template, Piwik PRO Client, is designed to work in unison with the Piwik PRO HTTP API. Most often these requests are generated by the Piwik PRO JavaScript tracker, but theoretically any HTTP source that uses the same schema can send requests for the Client to claim. Once the Client claims the request, it generates an event data object that can be consumed by tags in the server-side Google Tag Manager container.

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Google has released a new feature, First-Party Mode (FPM), into public beta. Image source First-Party Mode seeks to make it easier to wrap Google’s measurement and advertising technologies in a first-party, same-origin context. This means that the user’s browser, when visiting a website running FPM, would no longer communicate directly with Google’s domains when fetching measurement libraries such as Google Tag or Google Tag Manager. Instead, the requests would be sent to a subfolder of the website itself.

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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. It looks as if your page_view hits as well as any other hits marked as “Conversions” (or key events now, I guess) are automatically redispatched to the server-side Google Tag Manager endpoint when consent is granted! This sounds incredibly useful.

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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. When using Advanced Consent Mode, Google Analytics 4 collects hits when consent is in "denied" state. These hits have a lot of parameters stripped off them, including identifiers like the Client ID and the Session ID. The hits will not surface in reports directly, but they will instead go through a modeling process to enrich the reports once modeled.

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**Last updated March 7, 2024. Clarified that you do NOT need to resend hits when consent is granted, if those hits were collected on the same page when consent was denied. Google’s Consent Mode continues to be a hot topic, especially since in 2024 it will be required to implement Consent Mode in case a website or app is collecting data for audience building or remarketing with Google’s advertising services.

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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. Now, when you create a new container and choose the automatically provisioned tagging server option, this service will be created in Google Cloud Run instead of in Google App Engine. While I’ve written about Cloud Run before, this update gives me an opportunity to review what actually happens when you provision a Cloud Run environment, how you can upgrade it, and how you can add enhancements such as multi-region load balancing to it (with ease, I might add!

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Google is going all-in with Google Tag. We’ve already seen the consolidation effort through products like Google Analytics 4, and now Google is extending the merging of the tagging stack into Google Tag Manager, too. I’m referring to the new Google Tag that has replaced Google Analytics 4 configuration tags in your Google Tag Manager containers. With this release, all your old GA4 configuration tags have been auto-migrated to the new Google Tag.

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