TagEasy

Server-side tagging

Server-side tagging routes your tracking hits through a server you control instead of straight from the browser to GA4/Google Ads. Three things improve once that's in place:

  • Better data quality. Ad blockers and iOS tracking limits silently drop browser-side hits. A first-party server hit looks like any other request.
  • Longer cookie lifetimes. Browsers cap third-party cookies aggressively; cookies set by your own domain live much longer.
  • Server-side enrichment and redaction. The tagging server can add information (server-known user ids, fraud signals) and strip PII before it ever reaches Google.

How TagEasy splits the work

TagEasy is the config layer — we create the server-side GTM container in your Google Tag Manager account, write the GA4 and Google Ads server tags into it, publish the workspace, and point your web container at the tagging-server URL. You host the tagging server itself. The two well-supported hosting paths:

Stape (recommended)

Stape is a managed sGTM host. You open an account, create a new container, paste your public container id, and they hand you a tagging-server URL — no infrastructure to run. TagEasy guides you through it on the Developer tab and accepts the URL Stape gives you.

Google Cloud Run (self-hosted)

If you'd rather host it yourself, deploy Google's official server-side container image to Cloud Run, map a subdomain to it (so requests appear first-party), and paste that URL into TagEasy. You manage scaling, costs, and TLS.

What TagEasy publishes

Inside your new server container, in a dedicated TagEasy workspace:

  • A GA4 server tag (always) — forwards every event claimed by the default GA4 client to your GA4 property.
  • A Google Ads conversion server tag (only when both a conversion id and label are set in your Goals step) — fires on the purchase event with a managed custom-event trigger.

Both are namespaced te:server:… so they're easy to spot in the GTM UI. We never touch tags or triggers we didn't create.

The five-step setup

On a website's Developer tab, the Server-side tagging panel walks you through:

  1. Create the server container. A one-click POST to the GTM API — creates a new container in the same account as your web container.
  2. Host the tagging server. Set up Stape (or Cloud Run) and paste the resulting tagging-server URL.
  3. Publish the server config. Generates the GA4 + Google Ads server tags and publishes the workspace.
  4. Link the web container. Sets serverContainerUrl on your GA4 Configuration tag so browser hits route through your tagging server.
  5. Verify. Pings /healthz on your tagging server and marks the setup verified once it returns 200.

Plan

Server-side tagging is a Business-tier capability. See pricing for plan limits, or developer tools for the other server-side features TagEasy ships with (server ingest API, Meta CAPI mirror).