IP Anonymize Smart Option

Google Tag Manager Server Container
1

Hi,

I activated the Anonymizer power-up, changed the server url and it’s almost perfectly working. I’m saying “almost” because there are still some rooms I need to be sure.

First of all, what I have in X-Real-Ip as IP value is different from the one in outgoing request to GA4. Why is this happening? Of course it is no problem in terms of IP anonymizing in GA4 but I’m just curious about this difference.

Second, X-Geo-Country is populated as ZZ, which refers to unknown. This is a big problem for me because I’m pushing this data to GA4 as custom dimension but now what I have as a result of this anonymizer is just dummy data. Is it possible to fix that? Or do you recommend any workaround?

How are you generating those static IP addresses (the ones sent to GA4)? Are they from a list publicly available? Is this action GDPR compliant? I mean yes we are not sharing the ip address of our visitor but we are sharing someone else’s ip address, isn’t it the case?

Thanks for the answers!

2

Hi there

  1. X-Real-Ip reflects the actual IP (as the name suggests) it is still in the headers because you might want to use it for whichever other purposes. Anonymizer makes sure GA4 recevies redacted data, nothing is technically stopping you from using those same incoming hits for other purposes/destinations.

  2. When you see ZZ in X-Geo-Country that means the system has not resolved the country of origin and defaults to ZZ. No particular workaround here, except for maybe querying for that data elsewhere

  3. the list of IPs is static, originally chosen at random for each country. I don’t have definitive answer on compliance but I’d wager it’s fine. If this particular part is concerning - you can always switch to removing the octets