Every organization would greatly benefit from implementing a Tag Management solution, as it provides a strategic alternative to scattering non-version-controlled pixels across a website. Given the numerous advantages it offers, it’s highly recommended to transition to server-side tagging. Despite potentially higher costs for small, low-traffic personal sites due to server redundancy requirements, the refined data collection it offers makes it a worthwhile investment for small-medium businesses (SMBs) and larger enterprises.
Here are a few compelling reasons why upgrading your tagging solution is beneficial:
Google Tag Manager Server Side benefits
You may have heard of Apple’s ITP , which limits all cookies set by JS, for example by Google Tag Manager (GTM), to a 7-day expiration timeframe. It does not matter that these cookies may be your first-party cookies, they will still fall under this policy.
However, you can use GTM server-side to set all your cookies as HTTP only, increasing the expiration limit up to 2 years.
Instead of executing a lot of API calls, too many pixels, etc. in the user’s browser and thus causing an increased page load time, we can offload all of this to our server container. One great example is the Facebook pixel, which loads the full library into the user’s browser. However, we can now piggyback on a GA4 tag and send this data to our server container, and from there to Facebook, thus saving load time on the user’s end.
Before, each event triggered into GA would have needed all data to be readily available prior to the event firing. With server-side tagging, we can trigger any event, and enrich the data in our server-side container prior to sending it to GA, or any other destination. We can connect to APIs and use any returned data in our GA event before we send it off to Google’s servers.
We accomplish this with a custom tag written in JS to access the API’s endpoint.
Then we trigger another event to fire off the enriched data to GA
