Anonymizer power-up

The Anonymizer power-up removes or anonymizes user data in your sGTM container before it reaches GA4. Use it to stay compliant with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA without changing your existing tagging setup.

Anonymizer is available on the Free subscription plan and higher. To check your current plan or upgrade, go to your sGTM container settings.

How to set up Anonymizer

1. Log in to your Stape account and select your sGTM container from the dashboard.

2. Go to Power-ups and click Use next to the Anonymizer panel.

3. Toggle the Anonymizer switch to enable it.

4. Configure each parameter group:

- IP & Client ID - choose one of the following:

• Leave as is - no changes applied.
• Anonymize - removes the last octet of the IP address or Client ID.
• Anonymize Strict - removes the last two octets.
• Anonymize Smart (IP only) - replaces the IP with a static IP from the same country.

- General info, System info, User agent parsed, Ads campaign attribution - choose one of the following:

• Leave as is - no changes applied.
• Remove - removes the specific parameter.
• Remove all - removes all parameters in that section.

5. Click Save Changes.

6. Copy the link shown under the Anonymizer switch.

7. Paste the link as the Tagging Server URL in your web container’s Google tag.

Testing

There are several ways to test Anonymizer power-up. 

Option 1. sGTM debugger 

Open the sGTM debugger and inspect outgoing GA4 requests. Test different scenarios: events with and without user parameters, URL parameters, and verify that the expected fields are absent or anonymized.

For example, in the following screenshot you can see:

• _uip=2a09:bac5:4887:: - the IP address is truncated, the last segments are zeroed out (::)
• aip=1 - IP anonymization flag is set

Option 2. GA4 debugger 

Use the Google Analytics 4 debugger Chrome extension to check what data GA4 actually processes on its end:

1. Visit your website and trigger the events you want to test.
2. Go to GA4 → Admin → DebugView.
3. You'll see events streaming in real time. Click into an event and inspect its parameters. Any parameters you configured to remove in the Anonymizer should be absent here. This method can't confirm IP or Client ID anonymization, use Option 1 for those.

Use case

A sample scenario is an eCommerce store operating in the EU that collects behavioral data via GA4. Their legal team flags that full IP addresses are being forwarded to Google Analytics, which conflicts with their data processing agreement under GDPR.

You can identify this problem and fix it this way:

1. Open your sGTM debugger and inspect the outgoing GA4 requests. If you see a full IP address in the _uip field, that data is reaching Google's servers unmodified.
2. Enable the Anonymizer power-up and configure it: set IP to Anonymize or Anonymize Strict.
3. Trigger a few test events, then re-inspect the outgoing GA4 request in the sGTM debugger. Confirm _uip is truncated.

If configured correctly, GA4 will continue receiving event data for reporting while the fields that locate individual users are stripped before leaving your server.