One thing to note -- while provisioning your servers / server deployment with App Engine, you must set up the testing environment first before setting up a production environment. If you don't, you'll get an a rather cryptic error. The reason why Simo was able to set his to production is because he had already set up a testing environment using the same process.
Thanks for creating this video Simo! It's super clear. Too bad you have to link your Credit Card to the Cloud Console. This will probably scare smaller clients off. Luckily, I can use it for medium/bigger sized clients from my company. Keep up the good work!
I've watched 4 videos on SS GTM already but I haven't found a single example of GA events or "button click" triggers in use for SS GTM. All the examples are pageview tags and pageview triggers (sort of). Can you make click trigger tags (e.g. "button click event") with server-side GTM or not?
Wondering what the use case would be to send from your web container to the server end point if one of the appeals here is not having have the web container that loads all of that in the user's browser?
There's a big difference between loading FacebookSDK.js from Facebook's servers in the browser vs. your own inline code (even within GTM) that sends the data to your server endpoint. By ridding the client from the burden of loading JS from third-party CDNs, you limit the browser's exposure to page load -blocking network hiccups and third-party cookie exploits. To get rid of third-party code in the browser is also an *ideal* to strive towards - it's difficult if not downright impossible to actually do. But the point is to explore the options of moving to a custom-built event stream to your own server endpoint vs. loading 3P JS that sends data directly to the vendor. With many vendors, e.g. Facebook, this is already possible, and I'm sure once server-side tagging becomes more and more popular (as I'm sure it will), more and more vendors will similarly follow suit.
@@TeamSimmer Got it. So more of a gradual migration vs the full flip of a switch. One nice thing I'm seeing already is that businesses who are wanting to aggregate data in their own DB but aren't necessarily using dozens of tools to pull data from won't have to build out custom data pipelines in a totally different framework. I am for example looking to pull data from web, app, and a video provider and I think we'll now be able to do it through GTM.
Normally you'd run both browser-side and server-side GTM in tandem. Browser-side GTM sends hits to server, and server-side GTM handles the hits. This reduces browser load, increases security, and a bunch of other benefits. The way the server-side GTM works is that it is essentially an API endpoint. You send it HTTP requests from anywhere, including browser GTM, mobile app, server, whatever.
Hey Simo, do you have any experience with Server Side Tagging and the conversion api of Facebook - is this the solution for the OS14 problem of Apple ?
FB Conversion API (cAPI) can easily be handled without server-side GTM. But browser-side GTM won't help with instances where visitors disable Javascript functionality / adblockers etc. Is this the solution for iOS14? You need to read the article Simo has on this. It's a partial solution. But you still need to consider GDPR, CCPA, ITP etc (gawd the acronyms keep building up!) Privacy and opt-in management is a complex issue that must be addressed... at some point. Yes, you can side-step iOS 14 opt-out preferences with SS GTM. But like Simo says, should you? Hmmmmm... you're taking on some risks!
Hello @simo, what I don't get is: can server-side tagging be free in some cases? For example, if we need to setup Facebook CAPI, is there a free solution to achieve that?
Hey Marco, can be free if you're running under the free tier limits, if you're running 1 app engine instance. A lot of small businesses won't consume more than $2 to $3 per month.
