Setting up server-side tagging can be daunting. You have to invest time and money into setting up a cloud server, get familiar with the key concept of server-side tracking, and finally, set up server-side tracking. We created Stape hosting for the server Google Tag manager to make server-side tagging easier.
With Stape, you can set up tagging server URL in 1 click - it's super simple. Plus, it saves you money. Stape’s hosting is around five times cheaper than GCP.
With that being said, Stape's sGTM hosting has multiple benefits, including its price point and simplicity, which allows anyone without technical knowledge to set up cloud hosting for the Google Tag Manager server.
But besides its cost and simplicity, Stape has multiple other advantages. In this post, I want to cover all benefits that Stape hosting for sGTM offers.
When it comes to server-side Google Tag Manager hosting, businesses often compare Google Cloud Platform with Stape, a popular alternative that offers simplicity and cost savings.
It’s highly recommended to use a custom subdomain for your tagging server URL. It will help to set cookies more accurately and prolong cookies.
Let me show a few examples.
Increase cookie lifetime
Safari has built-in Intelligent Tracking Prevention algorithms that cut cookies’ lifetime to 24 hours (most of the time). With the help of server-side tracking with a custom subdomain, you can prolong cookie lifetime in Safari. It means that when a user revisits your site, they won’t be considered as a new user.
Set 1st party cookies
When setting up Facebook conversion API using server GTM, you need to send fbp and fbc to Facebook servers. You can’t set these cookies when using a third-party subdomain as a tagging server since only your domain has access to declare cookies for your website. Without a custom subdomain, fewer parameters would be sent to Facebook, and hence lower number of events would be attributed to your campaigns. Click ID and browser ID (fbc and fbp) are fundamental parameters when measuring the results of your paid campaigns on Facebook.
Stape's Custom Loader does even more - it helps make Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4 scripts more resistant to blockers.
You can set up a custom gtm.js loader inside the stape.io admin. Just click settings and add your Web Google Tag Manager ID. After that, you need to update the GTM code on the site.
When you add web GTM ID to the stape.io Custom Loader, you can see that gtm.js and gtag.js were replaced by a random request path. This enhancement helps you “hide” the Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4 script from adblockers.
Global CDN is an excellent feature available for all Stape sGTM containers, and it's entirely free to use. It utilizes Cloudflare’s platform, which loads js files from a server that resides closer to your site visitors resulting in faster webpage loading speeds.
Pro and Business plan users have access to Logs. This feature is handy while setting up server-side tracking. It helps understand what data was sent to server GTM and what response was sent. For example, you can check if all purchase events had status 200 (meaning were processed correctly) or filter all events with 500 errors and see the error reason.
1. Access Logs. Show the requests received by your GTM server. You can check the details of each log and see corresponding Request logs and Response logs if any.
2. Request Logs. Show requests that the server has sent to the Facebook, TikTok, etc., platforms. Available only if you use Stape tags.
3. Response Logs. Show the server's response from the Facebook, TikTok, etc., platforms. Available only if you use Stape tags.
Since using Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant, we created an Anonymizer power-up. With Anonymizer you can remove or anonymize user data from Google Analytics 4.
This product includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com
After Anonymizer is configured, you should update the tagging server URL for your Google Analytics to the one that ends with /anonymize.
For example, if the default tagging server URL is sgtm.site.com, then URL with Anonimiser will look like sgtm.site.com/anonymize. When GA requests go through the tagging server URL that includes /anonymize, we automatically remove or anonymize selected parameters.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) functionality now limits the lifespan of cookies, even if they are set from a first-party domain. But you can easily continue using the full cookie duration with Stape.
Cookie Keeper helps you prolong cookie lifetime set by 3rd party IPs for browsers with the newest version of ITP like Safari 16.4.
With our Business plan (or higher) you can map several subdomains to one server container!
So if you have a separate website for each country or language - you can configure Multi-Domains power-up. Add all subdomains that you want to use for the server-side endpoint. For Business plan users the limit is 20 domains, for Enterprise - 50 domains, for Custom - it's unlimited!
Preview Header is a useful feature when you need to send requests to the server Google Tag Manager container from elsewhere (not web GTM). For example, from the CRM. Using the stape preview header feature, you can see requests from the CRM in the Google Tag Manager server container preview mode.
Let’s say you want to send a purchase event from the CRM to the server Google Tag Manager. One of the ways to do that is using webhooks. Data from the webhook will be delivered to your server Google Tag Manager but won’t be displayed in the preview mode, making debug and setup more complicated.
This is where the Stape’s preview header feature helps. Using preview header, you can “force” sGTM preview mode to display all requests sent to the sGTM, no matter whether it was done by your web GTM or third-party resources like webhook. If you do not use the preview header, your sGTM container will receive data, but requests won’t be displayed in the preview.
To set up the preview header in Stape, open the preview mode of the server Google Tag Manager -> Click three dots in the top right corner -> Click send requests manually -> Copy X-Gtm-Server-Preview HTTP header.
Then go to your stape.io account -> click settings -> sGTM Preview header config -> paste preview header you’ve copied from the sGTM -> Click save.
Remove the preview header once you’ve done with the setup and testing
Stape has two types of accounts:
Using agency accounts, you can manage and create containers for clients. This feature can be handy for agencies. Let’s say you want to set up server-side tracking for your client and ask a client to add payment. You can do it using a stape agency account, just create a container and send an invite to a client via email. The client can add their billing, while you still can manage and set up their container. If you would like to apply for an agency account, just send an email to support@stape.io
You can share access to your stape.io account with other people. Once you've shared access, another person will have full access to your account. They will be able to view, edit all containers.
To share access click on Account Settings -> Shared Access -> Invite User.
A flexible Google Cloud environment will autoscale your sGTM from a minimum of 3 servers to 6 servers. When Google notices that your server GTM needs more resources, they automatically autoscale. sGTM may require more resources for several reasons: traffic to your website may increase, or you've updated server-side tagging setup and sending more events, etc.
Autoscale has both pros and cons. The good thing is that sGTM will receive more space when it needs and will continue functioning. There might be situations when cloud hosting stops working without autoscale, and you need to update it manually.
The bad thing is that autoscale means a higher price for sGTM hosting. Three servers from Google will cost USD 120, while six will cost around USD 240.
On Stape, we autoscale servers when you need them. If our system notices that your server needs more CPU or memory, we add it. Stape does not apply additional charges for the autoscale. If you’ve subscribed to the Pro plan, you will still pay USD 20, and server GTM will get more CPU and memory when it needs, and you will still pay the same amount. Our billing is connected to requests only.
We're always looking for ways to expand our platform, which is why we've added API access. If you are interested in building an integration with Stape and want more information on how it works or what the requirements might be then just send us an email to support@stape.io
The default GCP deployment uses a single server. This environment is recommended for testing limited traffic. When you decide to move server-side tagging to the production stage, you should upgrade to App Engine flexible environment.
When you upgrade, Google allocates a minimum of 3 servers per container for redundancy.
There are two main points you should consider when upgrading from test GCP deployment to App Engine flexible environment:
Costs
The minimum production set up on Google hosting will cost USD 120 (three cloud servers where each costs USD 40). Stape’s minimum cost is USD 20; for more significant sites, we offer the Business plan that costs USD 100—interested why we are cheaper? We have this blog post describing how Stape optimizes the cost of the GTM server.
Run shell scripts to upgrade to production
When you decide to upgrade to the production environment, adding a credit card to the Google Cloud is not enough, and you need to run shell scripts manually to upgrade to the production. Plus, some other configurations are required to decrease the costs of server Google Tag Manager hosting.
Stape hosting will do the job for you and in less than 30 seconds, making the upgrade of the cloud server streamlined. All you need to do is click one button in the stape.io admin.
The default configuration requires modifying Google Analytics 4 clients to load GA from your server URL. You’ll also need to add Google Tag Manager Web Container client to load gtm.js from a custom subdomain.
Loading gtag.js and gtm.js from your tagging server URL will give full advantages of server-side tracking and first-party cookies.
Stape hosting does everything automatically. You just need to add transport URL to the GA4 and UA tags inside the web Google Tag Manager container. No need to set up additional clients or make other configurations in the server Google Tag Manager container.
We have several hosting zones and are constantly expanding server locations.
We currently offer these server locations for sGTM on Stape Global:
We offer these server zones for Meta CAPIG on Stape Global:
The following server locations are available for sGTM on Stape Europe:
We offer these server zones for Meta CAPIG on Stape Europe:
Google Service Account can help you to integrate BigQuery and Firestore with server GTM.
To create a Google Service account, you will need to have a Google Cloud Platform account and generate an Access Key. The service account JSON key file must be added to an sGTM container power-up in app.stape.io to authenticate with these services.
You can add X-GEO-Country,X-GEO-Region,X-GEO-City, X-GEO-Ipaddress in event data inside your server Google Tag Manager with our GEO headers power-up.
This product includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com
You may notice that the server GTM container set up using automatic provision takes a long time to load. Stape’s hosting solves this problem by using brotli to optimize the loading speed and using Nginx instead of node.js since Nginx is faster in cached file serve.
You can add X-Device-Mobile, X-Device-Os, X-Device-Browser, X-Device-Browser-Version, X-Device-Engine, X-Device-Engine-Version header in event data inside your server Google Tag Manager with our User Agent Info power-up.
Own CDN increases cookie lifetime in Safari 16.4 and other browsers using ITP set from “third-party” IP addresses.
The most recent iteration of ITP reduces the lifetime of first-party cookies to 7 days if they are set through a different IP address than your website.
By utilizing your Stape Own CDN, you can route the server GTM tagging URL via the same IP address your site uses. This ensures that the IPs for your sGTM URL and website are identical. As a result, WebKit will not shorten the duration of first-party cookies set via the server-side Google Tag Manager.
With the power-up File proxy you can proxy any file through the server Google Tag Manager. Now you can load files from your domain instead of using third-party domains.
File proxy power-up is available to Business and higher plans. In order to enable it, all you need to do is log in to your stape.io account, open container, choose power-ups and click "Use" button.
The power-up XML to JSON can convert XML to JSON format in the server Google Tag Manager.
How to get it done:
1. Set webhook to send data to the URL https://ss.example.com/stape/xml/
2. https://ss.example.com should be the tagging server URL you use for the sGTM container.
3. Add any path after /stape/xml/, for example, https://ss.example.com/stape/xml/data, and this path will be used to send a request to your sGTM. In this case, we will send JSON to /data.
This webhook will convert XML to JSON format.
In order to enable it, all you need to do is log in to your stape.io account, open container, choose power-ups and click "Use" button.
This power-up adds a user ID to the sGTM event data.
User ID consists of a hash of:
In order to enable it, all you need to do is log in to your stape.io account, open container, choose power-ups and click "Use" button.
If you want to send a request on a defined schedule, we created a power-up Schedule just for your need!
How it works:
In the path field, you should specify the request path that should be sent on schedule.
Request can be sent:
In order to enable it, all you need to do is log in to your stape.io account, open container, choose power-ups and click "Use" button.
The power-up Request delay can delay requests from 15 minutes to 1500 minutes.
The Monitoring feature allows you to be notified of any anomalies or tracking issues as soon as possible. It is available to all Stape sGTM hosting users with Business, Enterprise and Custom plans.
Store is a Stape’s built-in database that allows you to write, read and sync data within the server Google Tag Manager hosted on Stape. The store is available for Pro plan users and higher.
The functionality and design of the stape store are extremely similar to Firebase. You can store JSONs of data organized in documents. 1mb - maximum size of one document.
This power-up checks if the requests are coming from the bot or not.
To use Bot detection power up, log in to your stape.io account, open the sGTM container, go to the Power Ups tab, and click Bot detection power up. After that, enable the power-up and click Save.
Stape Analytics is a feature of the Stape platform designed to simplify the measurement of server-side tracking performance.
You can find the feature in your container in the section "Analytics" next to "Power-Ups". Stape Analytics is available for everyone who uses Stape Custom Loader (a free power-up by Stape that makes GTM scripts more resistant to ad blockers).
Find our newest Connections feature in the Container settings.
It was created for the purpose of gathering oAuth tokens from multiple platforms in one tab for even more convenient tag setting. Though currently still in development, the feature allows you to set up, for example, Microsoft advertising automatically, instead of manually creating and configuring your own app.
The feature is accessible on Pro and higher plans.
At Stape, we have a team of experts in server-side tracking to help you get started. We understand that setting up accurate and reliable tracking can be a challenge, which is why we’re here to help make sure your clients get the best possible results. Our staff has extensive experience in creating and managing server-side tracking containers for all kinds of businesses, from small startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Stape’s hosting for the server Google Tag Manager is not just the cheapest and easiest one to set up. We also offer numerous hosting features as well as server-side tagging solutions, making your tagging experience simple and straightforward.
Though Stape’s sGTM hosting is located on Google Cloud, all our automated solutions make managing your server GTM hosting more effortless. We help you set up server-side tagging for your website without the need to spend hours setting everything up tagging the server manually.
If you are interested, please answer the following questions. We will send a free quote.
