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We Built the Data Collection Logger We Wished Existed
Building a NEW “best-of-breed” sGTM logger: real-time alerts, cumulative metrics, data quality checks, and a framework that grows with you tl;dr What does this solve for in summary? Server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) solves a lot of data collection challenges, but it also creates a new blind spot: once a tag runs inside a Cloud…
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How to prove a server-side GTM and GA4 setup before it ever touches production
The problem nobody likes to talk about Server-side tagging has become the serious way to collect analytics data. Moving Google Tag Manager and data collection to a server container on a first-party domain improves data quality, lengthens cookie lifetimes, restores attribution that browsers and ad blockers would otherwise erode, and gives you proper control over…
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Listen very carefully – you will do this only once
Unless you grew up in the UK in the 80s or you have an intimate fascination with BBC sitcoms from that era, you may not fully appreciate the mangled ‘Allo ‘Allo catchphrase reference of this post… Design Pattern: Idempotency in data pipelines The goal is to guarantee that an event-driven workload (Cloud Run Function or…
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User Provided Data for Google Platforms
Collecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII) has been a staple in data collection for a while. Different platforms have different requirements and use the data in different ways. Today I’ll focus on Google’s User Provided Data, which is a big part of their new Data Strength programme, designed to enable and incentivise you to collect data…
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GTM and Google Tag Update
GTM doesn’t usually have massive updates, but a very big change is coming. Here’s a walkthrough of the new UI: destination tags, Google Tag Settings, Container Overview, and the updated Preview Mode.
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Measure Summit – Data Strength is your new KPI. Here’s how the Data Manager API delivers it.
Measure Summit is virtual, but the energy in the chat was anything but. Data Strength is the 2026 measurement KPI, and the Data Manager API is the mechanism Google has now given us to deliver it.
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GTM Changes Highlights – May 2026
Google has informed the industry that we’re going to see some significant changes in Google Tag Manager and Google Tags this summer. In addition to what’s coming up in Google Marketing Live, here’s a little more colour to help you see the direction of travel. May 2026 – UI Refresh No functionality is being removed,…
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Is Your GA4 Reports Snapshot Actually Telling You What You Need to Know?
The Reports snapshot is the first thing you see when you open GA4. It’s meant to be a quick pulse check on your site. The trouble is, for most businesses, what GA shows by default isn’t always what you need to see.It’s easy to miss this as a setup option. Easy to glance at, no…
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Debugging sGTM Preview Mode in a Google Tag Gateway World
If you have ever tried to debug server-side GTM behind a Google Tag Gateway setup, you will have felt the quiet pain of a preview window that refuses to light up. The hits are going through, the data looks fine, and yet Preview Mode sits there in silence. In a previous post we…
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Consent Mode Overview
The GDPR was introduced on May of 2018. Since then, in the UK, the ICO has been responsible for enforcing it. For years now there has been a regulation in place stating how to collect, withdraw, and document data in regards to user consent. Google Consent Mode was launched in…
