How to set up server-side GA4 for BigCommerce
Uliana Lesiv
AuthorUnderstanding how customers interact with your online store is essential for evaluating product performance, monitoring eCommerce revenue, and identifying where users leave the purchasing journey. Although the platform provides built-in analytics reports, integrating BigCommerce with Google Analytics gives you more flexibility to analyze traffic sources, user behavior, ecommerce events, and conversions in one analytics environment.
A BigCommerce GA4 integration can collect important customer actions, including product views, add-to-cart events, checkout activity, purchases, and refunds. However, browser restrictions, ad blockers, and short cookie lifetimes can prevent some of this data from reaching Google Analytics. Server-side tracking helps make BigCommerce analytics more complete by routing tracking requests through a server container before sending them to GA4.
In this guide, we explain how to set up server-side Google Analytics 4 for BigCommerce using Google Tag Manager, Stape hosting, and the Stape Conversion Tracking app. The resulting setup can support more reliable eCommerce conversion tracking and provide the data needed to evaluate store and marketing performance.
Key BigCommerce eCommerce metrics to track in GA4
Before configuring the integration, determine which BigCommerce metrics should guide your analysis. Tracking every available value without a clear purpose can produce a large amount of data without showing what should actually be improved. A practical measurement framework should include several groups of BigCommerce KPIs:
- Product discovery: item-list views, item selections, and individual item views help measure how effectively visitors move from browsing a category to considering a particular product;
- Shopping intent: add-to-cart and remove-from-cart activity can reveal whether product interest develops into purchase intent;
- Checkout progress: comparing initiated checkouts with completed orders helps identify friction near the end of the buying process and measure the BigCommerce cart abandonment rate;
- Order value: BigCommerce average order value, the number of items per transaction, and revenue per purchaser show how much each completed order contributes to the business;
- Sales efficiency: the number of orders, purchase rate, and BigCommerce conversion rate can be compared across devices, locations, landing pages, and campaigns.
- Customer value: purchases per user, repeat orders, and the ratio of new to returning purchasers support BigCommerce customer analytics and help distinguish one-time buyers from loyal customers.
These BigCommerce store metrics should be evaluated together. For example, a product may attract many views but generate relatively few cart additions. Another product may receive less attention but result in a higher purchase rate or larger orders. BigCommerce product analytics helps reveal these differences and provides a more useful basis for merchandising decisions than isolated totals.
The same principle applies to BigCommerce sales analytics. An increase in orders does not necessarily indicate an equivalent improvement in commercial results if average order value declines or more transactions are later refunded. Combining volume, value, funnel progression, and customer metrics creates a more balanced view of store activity.
Server-side GA4 setup for BigCommerce
Step 1. Create a Google Tag Manager server container
➡️ Note
Before setting up your server-side Google Tag Manager container, it’s important to have web GTM container configured, because:
- The web container collects events, parameters and user interactions on your website.
- And sends this data to your server-side container.
Please follow the official Google documentation.
1. Select your GTM account → Click Admin → Click + next to the Container name.
2. Add Container Name → Under Target platform, choose Server. Click Create.
3. Choose Manually provision tagging server. Copy your container config. We will need it in the following steps.
Step 2. Create a Stape account to host your server GTM container
1. Go to stape.io and create an account or log in.
2. Click Create sGTM container on the main page.
3. Enter your container details.
- Container name - give your container a name (for convenience, we recommend using the same name you gave to the server container in GTM).
- Container configuration - paste the Container Config data that you copied from the Install Google Tag Manager pop-up. If you lost it, go to Google Tag Manager → click Admin → click Container settings → copy the string under Container Configuration.
- Server location - for best performance, choose the server location that’s closest to where most of your clients are. See the list of available server locations here. Also, you can opt for the Global multi-zone server location option if you have traffic from different regions. It will automatically route incoming requests to the nearest available zone based on the user’s IP address.
Then click Create Container.
4. Choose a plan for your container. You can start with a Free plan. Click Continue with a Free plan.
5. You will see the status of your container, container config, and plan name. It takes around 5 minutes to deploy a server container.
Please reload the page to update the status. If the Google Tag Manager server-side setup was done correctly, you should see the status Running.
Step 3. Create a Custom tagging server URL
The critical feature of server-side tagging is setting first-party cookies, which requires a server-side setup. You need to use a custom tagging server URL or domain to enable this feature. The custom tagging server URL or custom domain should share the same domain as your website.
Due to cookie restrictions, configuring custom domains for sGTM has become more complex. ITP affects user tracking in Safari and Firefox.
To improve your tracking, you need to set up a custom domain. It will help you prolong your cookie lifetime in all browsers.
Let’s discuss ways to configure a custom domain for your sGTM tagging server URL.
There are three ways to set up a custom domain:
- Same origin
- Subdomain
- Default domain
However, the “Same origin” method is technically advanced. You'll require a CDN or a load balancer to configure a same origin domain.
If you can't configure the same origin domain, we have solutions for prolonging cookie lifetime in Safari: Own CDN and Cookie Keeper.
By default, when you add your custom subdomain to your Stape container, it will be verified by the CNAME record.
Below is an example of a custom subdomain setup:
Use a custom tagging server URL, also called a custom domain, to set first-party cookies. This URL should use the same root domain as your website. For example, if your website is `example.com`, your tagging server URL can be `ss.example.com`.
There are three ways to set up a custom domain:
- Same origin – tagging server shares the exact domain and path with your site. Read more on how to set up a custom domain with the same origin.
- Subdomain – tagging server runs on a subdomain of your root domain. In this article we will guide you through this setup.
- Default domain – no custom domain; uses the standard Stape-provided address.
Step 1. Add your custom domain
Сhoose your container on Stape, scroll down to the Domains (Tagging Server URLs) section, and click +Add new.
Add Subdomain name - it can be any name that works for you, just be sure to avoid using phrases specific to advertising or tracking: ad, gtm, stgm, tracking, analytics, metrics, stape, gtag, etc.
Step 2. Add CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes your website's assets across a global network of servers to reduce latency and improve load times for users in different locations. It is useful if your audience is geographically distributed or if you want to improve cookie tracking and data accuracy.
By default, the CDN is disabled, which means JavaScript files (like gtm.js, gtag.js, and analytics.js) are served directly from the server location where your sGTM container is hosted. Effectively, it bypasses both Stape Global CDN and Own CDN options and gives you a direct, unproxied connection between your site and the sGTM container.
| Important: please consider your country's privacy regulations before setting up a CDN. |
To enable the CDN, click the Add CDN toggle and select one of the following options:
- Stape Global CDN - loads scripts from a server closest to your website visitor's location, which reduces latency and improves page load times for geographically distributed audiences. We will use the Stape Global CDN in our setup. This feature is free and available for all Stape sGTM containers.
- Own CDN (incompatible with the Automatically (via Entri) connection option) - helps route sGTM custom domain and proxy sGTM traffic through the DNS provider of your website. In this case, the IP addresses of your website and the custom domain of the sGTM will match, and server-side cookies will be considered as first-party. As a result, it gives the ability to increase cookie duration.
Step 3. Select the "How to connect" method
Next, in the How to connect section, there are two ways of connecting a custom domain to your container:
- Automatically (via Entri)
The easiest way to connect domains. Log in with your DNS provider details via Entri, and give us one-time permission to connect your domain. That's it, you can proceed directly to Step 5 to verify your domain; no manual configuration is required.
- Manually
With this option, you have to add DNS records manually to your hosting provider to connect your subdomain to Stape.
After you add a custom subdomain to your container, you will see DNS records that should be created to verify the custom domain. The DNS record depends on the server location and the CDN option you choose. In the next step, we show how to add DNS records.
Step 4. Add DNS records (for the manual connection method)
By default, subdomain verification is performed with CNAME records, but you can verify your subdomain with A and AAAA records if you need to (usually in cases when you need to avoid adding duplicated records).
We will cover both options below with a step-by-step guide on how to create records using Cloudflare. But you can use any other provider.
Adding a custom domain with a CNAME record
CNAME record(s) setup
You must create one CNAME record if you do not use Stape Global CDN and two records if you use Stape Global CDN.
1. Log in to your domain name service and create a new DNS record for the subdomain you want to use. To do it, click three dots and choose Configure DNS next to your domain name on the account home page.
2. Click Add record.
3. Go back to your Stape account and input the record you see in the account. Make sure that the Proxy status is turned off.
We use Stape Global CDN, so we create two CNAME records:
Adding a custom subdomain with A and AAAA records
| Please note that A/AAAA records are incompatible with enabled CDN. |
A/AAAA records setup
1. If you need to verify your custom subdomain using A and AAAA records, add the custom subdomain to the container and make sure that the CDN toggle is switched off.
Click Advanced settings and tick the Use A records instead of CNAME records box. You will see DNS records that you should add inside your Stape container. The DNS records you should configure vary depending on the server location.
2. Log in to your DNS account and add the records you see in your Stape account. On the account home page, next to your domain name, click three dots and choose Configure DNS.
3. Click Add record.
4. Then, create the records you see in your Stape account. Make sure that the Proxy status is turned off.
Take the values for your DNS records from the Stape account:
As a result, you will get two DNS records:
Step 5. Verify your domain
Once you've entered the DNS records to your DNS provider, return to the Stape container page where you've been configuring the custom domain and click Verify.
Wait for Stape to finish verifying your custom domain (when the container status bar changes from Verifying to Ready). Usually, it takes 2-3 hours to verify the custom domain. For some DNS providers, verifying records might take up to 72 hours. We will email you once the custom domain is verified or any error is detected.
If you face any problems with domain verification, please follow our guide on troubleshooting a custom domain.
Step 6. Add tagging server URL and update your website script
Go to your Google Tag Manager server container → Admin → Container Settings → change Tagging server URL to your subdomain.
Update the script
If you use a custom domain, updating the Web GTM script on your website is highly recommended. This tweak will load gtm.js from your domain. To do so, replace the default domain googletagmanager.com with the custom domain you set up in the previous step.
Alternatively, you can automate this process with the Custom Loader power-up. Instead of manually editing the GTM script, Custom Loader generates a ready-to-use code snippet that loads GTM and GA4 scripts directly from your custom domain. This saves your time, makes your tracking scripts more resilient to ad blockers, and assures all cookies are treated as first-party.
You’ll see your new custom domain in your sGTM container’s list of domains. If you’re on a paid subscription, you will also see the Tracking Score estimating the quality of your domain’s tracking setup.
Click on your domain to access its settings:
Click Score to get more information about the Tracking Score report. Tracking Score report gives you an overview of your tracking setup health. Be sure to click the View full report button to get the full information, or New scan to update the report. Learn more about what constitutes a full report in our guide.
Step 4. Set up a Custom Loader
Custom Loader modifies gtag.js and gtm.js loading paths to resist ad blockers and ITPs, potentially increasing data volume by up to 40%.
5.1 Find and copy your web GTM ID in GTM. To find GTM ID log in to your Google Tag Manager account and open a Web GTM container. In the top right corner (next to the Submit and Preview buttons) you’ll see some short text that starts with "GTM-" and then contains some letters/numbers.
5.2. Select your sGTM container from the dashboard.
5.3. Go to Power-ups and click Use next to the Custom Loader panel.
5.4. Toggle the Custom Loader switch to enable it and click Save changes.
5.5. In the Code & Setup information section, configure the following settings:
- Domain - select one of the domains linked to your container.
- Web GTM ID - enter your web Google Tag Manager ID.
- Enhanced ad blocker protection - when enabled, all requests to your sGTM server are encrypted so ad blockers can’t block them based on request patterns. Learn more about the enhanced ad blocker protection.
- Same Origin Path - if you use the same-origin approach, enter the path here so both GTM and gtag.js load through it.
- Platform - select BigCommerce and click Generate. You’ll get configuration and app installation instructions in the Configuration panel. Follow the app installation guide.
Step 5. Configure BigCommerce app
1. Install the Conversion Tracking app. Click Get this app → log in to your BigCommerce account → Install.
2. Then, you need to complete the settings parameters in three tabs: General, DataLayer, and Webhooks.
2.1 General tab
Here, you need to add the following data:
- GTM Web container ID - add the ID of Web container in the format GTM-XXXXXXX. You can find it in your GTM account in the tab “Accounts”. Click “Insert GTM snippet” to automatically add the snippet with JavaScript code to every page on your website.
- Custom domain - use your subdomain created for first-party cookies for the most precise tracking.
If you haven’t created a subdomain yet, please see our guide on adding a custom domain to sGTM container.
- Custom Loader - this feature will help increase protection against ad blockers, resulting in better data quality. Add in the field Stape container identifier. Check this quick guide to find your container identifier.
- Cookie Keeper - it helps prolong the cookies' lifetime by bypassing the browsers’ restrictions.
After setting all the necessary fields, click “Save”.
2.2 Data Layer tab
Here you can find a list of events and their payload, which is added via the App for BigCommerce.
In this tab, you can add two points to the settings:
- Add ecommerce Data Layer events - it will add standard Data Layer, based on them you can configure tracking in GTM container.
- Add user data to Data Layer events - with this feature, events will include user data. You can configure the data you want to collect from your website visitors in the GTM container.
- Decorate DataLayer event name - lets you decide whether to add the _stape suffix to event names to avoid conflicts with your existing GTM setup; when it’s turned off, events keep their standard names.
Click “Save”.
2.3 Webhooks tab
The webhooks feature will be handy if you want to track events outside your website, such as sales made by phone or in offline stores. You just add or update information on a user in CRM or CMS, and the webhook sends data in GTM.
To activate a webhook, you need to choose the type of webhook, “Purchase” or “Refund” (or both), and then you can click on “Send webhooks to server GTM container”. Then, add your GTM server container URL (the path where the webhook will be sent).
Click “Save”.
Step 6. Configure Google Analytics 4
There can be two scenarios:
4.1 If you already configured Google Analytics 4 inside your web GTM container, all you need to do is:
4.1.1 Add your server container URL to Google Tag settings. In the configuration settings, add the configuration parameter server_container_url and add your tagging server URL as a value.
4.1.2 Create Google Analytics 4 client in server GTM container. To do so, open the clients’ section → Create New client → Select client type Google Analytics: GA4 (Web) → Add client name and click Save.
You can also read more on region-specific parameters in our blog.
4.1.3 In the server GTM container create a new tag with the tag type Google Analytics: GA4
4.1.4 Add Measurement ID and Event Name.
Measurement ID - follow this guide to find GA4 ID. You can add it as variable or if the event came from a GA4 web tag, you can leave this field blank to inherit the measurement ID of the event.
Event Name - the event name to send to Google. See the recommended events for more information. If this field is blank, the value of the event_name parameter will be sent.
4.1.5 Click Triggering and configure a trigger with the trigger type Custom that will fire every time when client name equals GA4 (or the name of the GA4 client that you’ve specified on the step 2.b) → Click Save.
4.2 If you do not have GA4 configured, follow the below steps:
4.2.1 Inside the Web container, create a new tag of the tag Type Google Tag. Add your Google Tag ID.
Add trigger to GA4 tag. It usually should trigger on all page views.
You can also create a Google Tag: Configuration Settings variable that will predefine Google Tag settings if you need to use multiple Google Tags on your website and do not want to add settings for each tag manually.
These parameters can, for example, define whether you want to send a page view event every time a Google Tag triggers, set UTM parameters, set client ID, etc. There is a list of standard Google Tags configuration parameters.
4.2.2 To set up the GA4 event tracking, go to the tags section and create a new tag with the tag type Google Analytics: GA4 Event. Add your GA4 ID and the event name; there is a list of standard event names.
4.2.3 Go to your Google Tag Manager Server container. Click Clients and New.
4.2.4 Choose Google Analytics: GA4 (web) and click Save.
4.2.5 Go to Tags and click New.
4.2.6 Choose Google Analytics: GA4.
4.2.7 Add Measurement ID and Event Name.
Measurement ID - follow this guide to find GA4 ID. You can add it as a variable or if the event came from a GA4 web tag, you can leave this field blank to inherit the measurement ID of the event.
Event Name - the event name to send to Google. See the recommended events for more information. If this field is blank, the value of the event_name parameter will be sent.
4.2.8 Click Triggering.
4.2.9 Create triggers for the tag. Client name should equal GA4. Example:
Click +
Choose Custom type → click Some events → choose Client Name in built-in variables → set Equals GA4 (the name of your GA4 client) → click Save.
4.2.10 Open web and server GTM debuggers and test the setup.
Open the Server container preview mode and check that you see GA4 requests. Publish updated inside server and web Google Tag Manager containers.
Step 7. Update the tagging server URL of your Google Tag in the web GTM
Add the following record inside your Google Tag in the web Google Tag Manager container.
Configuration parameter: server_container_url
Value is your domain name in Stape admin
Step 8. How to test your GA4 server-side setup
7.1 Use Google Tag Manager Server-Side Container Preview and GA4 Debug Mode
We suggest starting with the Tag Manager preview and debug mode to ensure that your tags are triggering when they should. GTM debug tool will show you which tags and events were added to the site and whether they fired or not on particular pages/triggers.
Tag manager server container debug mode works similarly to web debugger. Just click the preview button on the top right corner. Then, navigate to the different pages and click on the button or perform events set up in the server container.
Return to the Tag Manager debugger and check which tags and events were triggered and if all required parameters were sent to the dataLayer. If everything works correctly, we can move to the next step.
GA4 has it's debug view that will show you all events, event parameters and user data that we processed by GA4. To find GA4 debugger click Configure → Debug view.
7.2 Check if GA4 sends requests from the correct tagging URL
To ensure that requests are sent from a custom tagging URL, you’ll need to dive deeper into the developer’s zone. We’ll need Chrome or Safari developer tools here (you can use other browsers as well).
On Mac, you can access the developer tool by clicking command+option+I or click the right mouse button, then Inspect.
Once you’ve opened the developer tools, go to the Network tab and refresh the page. Use the filter and type collect to find GA4 requests. Click on a GA4 request and check the Request URL and parameters on the right to confirm that hits are being sent to your server-side tagging domain (the same URL configured in the server container and GA4 tag/variable).
Keep in mind that you may not see collect requests if GA4 ad block bypass is enabled. In that case, it’s recommended to look for requests directly via your server-side subdomain (for example, sst.testdns.io) instead of relying on the default collect filter.
7.3 Check server-side cookies
Note: cookies will be extended only if you are using a custom subdomain inside the tagging URL. For instance, your website URL is example.com. Then, the custom domain for tagging URL should look like gtm.example.com.
Go to the application tab inside the developer tool that you’ve used in step two. Click Storage → Cookies. On the right side, you will find cookies named FPID; check the date in the column “expires”. This way, cookies should be extended up to 2 years. I am writing this post in February 2021, and my cookie will expire in February 2023. If you are not using server-side tracking and a custom tagging URL located under your main domain, Safari will decrease your cookie lifetime to 1 or 7 days. If you see that cookies were not extended, go to the GA4 client inside the server container, click more settings and check what Server Cookie Settings look like on the screenshot below. Or make sure that you are using a custom tagging URL that looks like gtm.yourdomain.com.
Use Stape’s GTM Setup Wizard to simplify the setup and generate preconfigured web and server GTM templates for BigCommerce and set up tracking with less manual work.
How to use BigCommerce data in GA4 eCommerce reports
Collecting data is beneficial only when it leads to specific actions. Once the integration is running, use GA4 to examine individual stages of the shopping journey, identify weak points, and determine which products and acquisition channels deserve attention. Instead of reviewing every available report, start with the business question you want to answer.
- Which products attract interest but fail to generate sales? Open Monetization → eCommerce purchases and compare item views, cart additions, purchases, and item revenue. Products with many views but few purchases may require changes to their pricing, descriptions, images, or positioning.
- Where do potential customers abandon the purchasing journey? Create a funnel exploration using
view_item,add_to_cart,begin_checkout, andpurchase. The largest drop between two stages shows where to investigate possible issues. - Which acquisition channels contribute to orders? Use Traffic acquisition to compare purchases and purchase revenue by source, medium, or campaign. This helps prioritize channels that generate orders rather than traffic alone.
- Does GA4 reflect the store’s actual transaction data? Compare GA4 purchases and transaction values with BigCommerce sales reports. Unexpected differences may indicate missing events, duplicated transactions, incorrect values, or unrecorded refunds.
Used this way, GA4 eCommerce reporting helps turn customer actions into practical improvements to merchandising, checkout, and marketing allocation. Review the reports regularly and investigate significant changes before making decisions based on them.
Conclusion
Integrating GA4 through a server-side setup expands the capabilities of BigCommerce analytics by providing a more reliable foundation for measuring store activity. The collected data can support BigCommerce sales analytics, customer behavior analysis, campaign attribution, and more informed decisions about store performance.
Stape simplifies the technical side of the integration by providing managed server GTM hosting and tools that support more resilient data collection. If you experience any difficulties during the installation, contact Stape’s support team at support@stape.io for assistance.
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