Now there are a bunch of good reasons to use Google Tag Manager's Server side.
It's a great way to take greater control
of your data flows on how your data goes from your website to your tracking tools,
and you can get higher quality data through that.
Everything is kept in the first party
context when you set up your domain, and that way you can also get around ad
blockers or other tracking prevention methods.
But you might be hesitant to try out Google Tag Manager Server side.
For one.
The costs are quite high if you run a Google Cloud app engine and you will have
to deal with all the set up work, but then also administering this kind
of new platform, the server which lives in the Google Cloud platform.
But what if I told you there is actually a better way?
In this video, I'm going to show you a way you can easily get started
with Google Tag Manager in just a few minutes and it's even for free.
So let's go over to the computer and I'll show you what I mean here.
I'm inside of Google Tag Manager already
and we have a Google Analytics 4 tag that we set up.
This is my client side implementation, so it's implemented on my demo shop as
normally and sending data over to Google Analytics.
Now we want to move that tag actually to the server side.
So we send that data over to our tagging
server first and from there it's forwarded onto Google Analytics.
For that, we need to install a Google Tag Manager server side instance.
So let's go over here and I'm going
to create a new container and let's call this GTM server side.
So then we choose Server right here and we
can create that Google Tag Manager instance.
Now this is just the interface we need
to now connect this to our tagging server actually.
And the way that Google Tag Manager
recommends us to do this is on the Google Cloud platform,
which you can automatically get started with pretty easily.
But you need to set this up with your
Google Cloud platform and you need to administer that server later.
Also upgrade this if you want to put this into production.
What we want to do is actually manually provision a tagging server.
Now you could set it up in other cloud
platforms like on AWS, on Amazon's Cloud or the other clouds
that are out there, but it also gets similar complicated.
So why isn't there a service that actually takes that hard part over for us?
Well there is.
It's called Stape and you can find it at stape.io
where you can get started for free and set up your managed server environment.
So it's a hosted kind of server that you can install Google Tag Manager on.
And the pricing is also pretty friendly.
So you can get started with a free account with 10,000 requests.
If you want to upgrade and use this
in production it gows as low as $20 a month and that is obviously much
different than the $120 that you should be spending on an app engine.
If you have three instances which Google Tag Manager recommends.
So you can get started really easily
for free and put in your email address and confirmed this.
Obviously I went ahead and already created an account for us here.
So we're going to go ahead and log in and once you're logged in you will get
your GTM containers that you already have set up so
We have some demo accounts here but I want to show you is creating a new container.
You can give this a name.
Again, this is our demo shop server
and now you need to put in your container configuration.
So where do I find that?
That's exactly what we saw here when we
wanted to manually set that up here so we can copy that.
If you already have a container set up,
you can always go to Admin section and then install Google Tag Manager again.
You get these two options here and you can copy this ID which stape needs.
So we'll put that in and then you can
choose where to actually locate your instance.
Let's put this here into Germany and we can use a custom domain.
This is very important.
If you want to have first party requests for that, you need to change your name
servers around and point that domain to this address.
I won't be doing this for right now
and all you need to do is create here and then it's deploying my instance
and in a second we'll get a URL that we can put into our admin section again right
here under container settings we need to have our server container URL.
So once that is done and it's running then
we get here our configuration Identifier API key but also our tagging server URL.
So we're going to copy this one and put this in place.
So let's save this.
And if this is now all updated we can go
back to the workspace and actually click on Preview.
Now this will open up our new Stape URL that has our Stape server.
We can actually send over a request here to our checking server.
Let's do that.
And it's totally normal that you see an error here.
But inside of our preview mode we see here
that a request just came in and I requested this URL.
So this is a fully fledged Google Tag Manager server at this moment already.
So all I need to do in order to send over my request from the client side is to go
into my Google Analytics 4 tag and let's here send to server container
with my Google Analytics 4 tag we'll enter the server here and all the data
that normally went to Google Analytics servers is now sent to this URL.
So I'm going to save this.
Let's preview this and here we go.
Our tag is deployed on our website right here.
We should see inside of our preview mode
of our Tagging server side instance that there is a new event called Pageview.
No request was claimed yet.
We need to set it up in a client which is done by default.
Now we just need to send it onto our GA4
so all I need to do is go over to Tags inside of our server side.
Very important to distinguish these and we'll set this up so it actually sends
over to Google Analytics 4 all we need is the measurement ID so
Let's copy that from our old tag here and we'll put this in here.
You can redact visitor IP, you can change the event names around,
you can manipulate the request that is going through.
And that is the power
of Google Tag Manager server side because we have full control over the request
that is sent over to Google Analytics 4 at this point.
So let's just give this a name here and I'm just going to go with all pages.
Although this would be all events in terms
of Google Tag Manager, whatever is coming in here,
it will forward this onto Google Analytics 4 so
again, let's refresh first of all our server side instance.
So that is fresh and then also our clients
end instance and this will reload our demo shop.
A request is sent this time not to our Google Analytics server but directly
to our server side instance and here we see that a page view came in and even
a user engagement and it's forwarded over to Google Analytics four and we will also
be able to see this inside of our Google Analytics 4 debug view right here.
So as you can see Stape is a very quick solution in order to get up and running
with GTM Server side and it gives you a handy interface right here where you can
see how many requests you have already been sending over from a perspective
of the limitations that you have on your plan.
Obviously if you want to put this in full
production and have a little bit more requests and this is counted by how many
requests are actually sent over to the server instances.
So if you have multiple tools and so, that will be multiple requests that will
be sent with every page that is for example generated.
So you need to keep that in mind and then you would be upgrading your plan.
But as you have seen it's quite affordable
to get started with this even for smaller businesses.
So overall I think you can see that stape.io makes it so much easier
to deploy Google Tag Manager server side, get started with it and even just try it
out if you want to sign up to this platform.
We have a link down below where you'll also get a discount if you sign up to one
of the paid plans as well now I'd love to hear from you what kind of questions
you might still have around Google Tag Manager service Side You can
maybe make another video on this one but it's so much easier to get started
right now than creating something in the Google cloud platform with the app
engine and trying to administer this all so Stape kind of takes this over for you
this particular step and I think it's quite useful.
This service has helped us out with many
different clients already so I wanted to teach it here as well now I hope this
video helps you out thumbs up button if you like this video to help us out
to spread this in the algorithm as well my name is Julian until next time.