Simo Ahava – Server-side Tagging in Google Tag Manager

What You Get:

Welcome to Server-side Tagging In Google Tag Manager! This course will teach you everything you need to know about setting up the tagging environment, migrating your client-side tags to run through the server, customizing the environment to better suit your needs, optimizing the Google Cloud Platform resources, and more…

With (welcome) advances in privacy legislation and with browser tracking protections, it has become more and more important to take control of the data flows moving between users and third-party vendors that want this user data.

By loading vendors scripts directly in the browser or the app, these scripts have free rein to collect data without practically any restrictions. These scripts often inflict severe performance penalties on the browsing experience as well.

Server-side tagging introduces a new intermediary between the user and the vendor. By deploying a Server container in Google Tag Manager, the site owner can move the cumbersome and privacy-invasive tracking and data collection logic to run through their server first, where they can do things like data validation, consent management, resource caching, and complete source anonymization to ensure the end user’s privacy.

In this course, we will walk through all the steps required to set up your own tagging environment. While you can do the course lessons with a zero-cost setup, once you move to a production environment, there will be some costs involved with running the virtual machines that handle your tagging environment (this is covered in the course).

-> If you are a marketing professional who wants to take your knowledge of Google Tag Manager and expand it to cover opportunities in the Cloud, this course is for you.

-> If you are in IT or web development and you’ve been concerned with the proliferation of client-side tags, and you want to take steps to improve governance, this course is for you.

-> If you are a manager who understands how important it is to establish ownership over data collection and processing processes within and organization, this course is for you.

-> If you are a data privacy or security professional who wants to deploy and utilize tools and methods for protecting the user’s right to control their data, this course is for you.

-> If you are a Google Tag Manager user who wants to know more about the Cloud and the possibilities of server-side technologies, this course is for you.

We expect our students to have a baseline knowledge of Google Tag Manager, but you do not need any experience of working with Cloud services. The course is designed to walk you through all the steps required to confidently work with server-side tagging in a professional context.

The course includes…

Task-based, bite-sized, self-paced video lessons

The course comprises 70+ videos, grouped into lessons. Each lesson is designed to explore some fundamental aspect of server-side tagging.

The videos are mainly voice-over screen recordings, with enhancements to make it easier to follow along. The course is self-paced, and you can take it at your own leisure.

The videos are accompanied with an interactive English transcript as well as subtitles to help you follow along.

The individual topics always contain text content to help flesh out the concepts.

Getting Started

1. Setup the server-side tagging environment
2. Create your first Client
3. Create your first Tag
4. Explore Preview mode in detail
5. Configure the browser to send the hits to the server

Upgrade The Environment

1. Reserve and map a custom domain to your server
2. Learn about DNS and how to setup the records properly
3. Learn about Cloud resources
4. Upgrade your environment to handle production data
5. Learn to optimize costs and to monitor your Cloud resources

Customize Your Endpoint

1. Import community templates into your Server container
2. Learn about custom templates and how they can be built from scratch or customized to your liking
3. Build your own Client template
4. Build your own Tag template
5. Learn how to consolidate data streams to preserve client-side resources and performance

Advanced Customizations

1. An ever-expanding inventory of advanced tips & tricks as well as advanced applications
2. This section will be constantly updated with new content
3. You’ll learn to do build your own APIs, work with other Cloud services, integrate with other tools, etc.
4. New content will always be announced on the course email list, and suggestions / requests for content will be received with gratitude