How can i send Data from the Data Tag to the outgoing GA4?
I have seen this post here Data Tag / data client to GA4
but i dont understand how to do the last point so that i can add the data tag event parameters to my ga4 server side ? Thanks
Only GA4 hits are recommended for GA4 events, I would not recommend using Data tag - Data Client hits for this.
Hey Alex - can you explain why that is true?
And if so then what am I gaining with the Data Tag and Data Client combination? Won’t this just create duplicate work often times for getting the exact same information?
In brief - GA4 generates many events automatically that you can’t reproduce correctly (session_start, first_visit, user_engagement, etc) - these are important events for running many reports in GA4. Since the GA4 tag code is not open source and there is no documentation about it - you will not be able to reproduce it properly with Data tag or any other alternatives.
At the same time, using GA4 for all platforms is problematic because GA4 hits even when using custom loader can still be blocked by some adblockers + GA4 has problems with sending arrays (try to send something other than items and see how it will be in event data) + many similar problems and limitations (e.g. tag behaviour if for some reason config is triggered later than event tag).
So best practice is to use GA4 hits for any Google platforms: GA4, Google ADS, Floodlight, etc.
And Data tag (or any platform-agnostic mechanism) to pass and use data for non-Google platforms.
Thanks Alex! That’s super helpful, and explains a lot of what I was running into problems with!
So a data tag is good for taking in things like commerce data or sending data back to the client side? Like I did The trick with the HTTP response for the stape user ID, and writing to a firebase store.
Would you recommend using the data tag and data client for things like sending corresponding server events to CAPI that line up to FB browser pixel tag event in the web client?