Hi there Measure Geeks, Julian here back with another video today, I want to
show you how you can create a Google Tag Manager server side instance in order to
deploy your tracking from your website through Google Tag Manager server side.
So if you're completely new to Google Tag Manager, you probably need to
log in with your Google account.
I trust that you know how to do that.
And then you will land on a screen, just like this one,
where you set up the account.
Normally you have, for example, a company that you set this up for.
Go ahead and put that into the account name and you can choose the country
and to share the data with Google.
And then you enter your container name.
This can really be anything you want, but if you want to keep it clean and you only
deploy this for one website, you could put in your website, for example in this
field as the domain, and this will help you to keep everything ordered later on.
And then we get to the target platform and here we are going to
choose our server site instance.
So let's go ahead and click on server and create.
Now, there is some tos that we need to read through and accept, and
then we get to the overview screen.
Now you can deploy Google Tag Manager service side automatically
through the Google Cloud Platform.
And for that, you also need to have an account then, or you can manually
provision your tagging server for that.
You would need to have your own server ready to deploy Google Tag Manager
Server Side read through the user.
gide If you want to be doing that, we will go with the automatically
provision tag server instance right here.
So I'm going to click on automatically detect, and then we
need to choose our billing account.
Now, again, if you are not yet familiar with Google Cloud Platform, you can
go over to Cloud dot, Google dot com
and you would need to sign up and also already put in a billing account in order
to set up Google Tag Manager server side.
I have done this already for my email address, and that's what
Google Tag Manager already recognizes this here, this is my number one
billing account, which I'm going to attach to my server side instance.
So I'm going to select this billing account and it will create the server.
This my take awhile.
So sit back and I'm going to fast forward and here we go.
We have created our server.
We get our Google Cloud Platform, project ID.
This is where you can find it again in your Google Cloud Platform
later on, and we get our default.
URL this is the server that was now created and that we can send requests
to in order to try out our Google Tag Manager server side instance.
Now, I say try out, because now this has created a sandbox for us where
we can try out our implementation.
If you want to take this live to your website, you will need to upgrade this
to a production version, which will cost you more money and requires a billing
account inside of the Google Cloud Platform, which we have already set up.
So let's go ahead and take a look here.
It kind of looks the same as Google Tag Manager with the big difference that there
is a new button here called Clients, and we're going into this in a little bit.
So what we want to do now is see if our server is actually reachable.
So I'm going to go back here and just copy this default URL.
And then I'm going to go ahead and click on preview here.
Therefore put our server side instance into a special mode, which kind of looks
like our preview mode on the website.
But now I'm going to go to my page here.
Put in our URL and we see we get a 400 error, but inside of
our server site, preview mode here, we see that there is a new.
Entry.
And this is a request that we just sent to this path, which was just
a slash we didn't return anything.
And none of the clients have claimed this request.
So what can we do with this now?
Google Tag Manager server side is kind of set up.
We could go ahead and send data to our server side instance, instead of Google
Analytics 4 and then relay our information to the actual Google Analytics.
endpoint.
For that, obviously we'll need a website.
So he is our trusted demo shop and our client that we already
have installed on this demo shop.
And if you want to send data to Google Analytics 4 we usually just go over
here and install a Google Analytics configuration tag, which we'll send our
data over to Google Analytics 4, we just need the measurement ID, figured it out.
So instead of a Google Analytics 4, we go over to the admin section.
You go over to our data streams.
And here we have our demo shop with our measurement ID, which we also going
to put in to this field right here.
And now we have an option here to send data to our server side container.
And here we need to enter the URL that we want to send this request to.
And this request we want to send to this URL, which you have already tried out.
So let's put that in here as well.
Now let's attach our all pages trigger.
And then also give this a name.
This is our Config Tag for Page Views save this, and it seems we
need to have a no trading slash here.
So let's go ahead and save this.
Okay.
And we can click on preview connect our preview to our site
and now that data that should be sent off to Google Analytics 4 is
being relayed and not sent to the Google Analytics end point, but
to our new server container URL.
And that should have already been received here inside of
our new server side instance.
So we have a page view here.
This is the information that was sent over,
so we have an incoming request and we have a client that
actually already claimed this.
This is a client that is there by default.
So under clients, here we are ready, have Google Analytics and Universal Analytics.
So if the right request comes in, clients are there to claim that request and then
pass that information into right format.
So you can later use it in tags.
So this has already worked and the information that Google this client.
The information that this client has passed is now available to
us as event data right here.
So this is the data that has been passed is more here and we can use
that data in our tags right now.
What do we want to fire?
Well, let's go ahead and simply take this information and send
off a Google Analytics 4 tag for that we can go over to tags, and
choose our Google Analytics 4 tag.
There are not many tag templates out there just yet, and we can overwrite the request
that is coming in so we could change the measurement ID if we wanted to, we
could change the event name, but for now I'm actually going to leave all of these
untapped, because we just want to relay the request and see
how the tagging actually works.
As the trigger we have are all pages trigger that kind
of is a quite open trigger.
There's kind of like an all catch trigger.
So we're going to go with this one just because we have one request
coming through, but if you only want to fire something, on certain requests
that come in, you definitely need to play around with triggers as well.
So let's give this a name.
So Google Analytics 4 still, this is a page view we're going to send over.
Actually, it's not really just a page view.
It would relay any requests that come through to the server side instance, for
that, we now to try that out, we need to still go on to preview that we'll open
up our mode here again, and then on our
client side, we still need to reload and send another request
to our server side instance, which then gets received and this time.
So we have here our Google Analytics 4 server side instance, we have
a tag that then fired as well.
And this is then transferred to Google Analytics 4 can see that
all come through, hopefully inside of our debug view as well.
Here we go.
We have a page view here.
that came in, not from a website, but it was relayed
through our server side instance.
So this is how you can set up a Google Tag Manager server side instance.
There's obviously much more that you can do with a Google Tag Manager
server side instance, we have, for example, a video on how you can send
data to the Facebook Conversion API via Google Tag Manager server side.
Two steps that I haven't covered, which might be useful for you to
consider one is to actually update your domains, which simply means that.
If you don't want to be using the app spot.com domain, which is the default,
because you want to do truly first party tracking, then you can change
this default domain around inside of your Cloud Console configurations.
I'm going to link up a help article on how to do this down below.
The second thing to consider is to actually upgrading your
container to be production ready.
That would mean that you upgrade the instance that the instance of
the cloud machine, that this is running on to have enough capacity
to handle more than you are testing.
And again, I'm going to link up a post down below on how to do this as well.
Don't forget.
Even on the server side instance, you still need to submit a version.
So this goes live and the server side instance, would be able to
receive those requests and forward them on to Google Analytics 4.
And obviously you would also need to do the same on your client's site as well.
So this is how you can utilize Google Tag Manager server side , we set it
up and send our first tag through with Google Tag Manager server side.
If this video helped you out, I'd love for you to hit that thumbs up
button, and also watch this video on a little bit more overview of how
Google Tag Manager server side works.
So you know what you're getting into.
Now, my name is Julian.
Till next time.