I’m currently refining my sGTM setup and I’ve encountered a technical point I’d like to clarify with the community’s help. I’ve spent the last few nights on this and I’m trying to ensure everything is 100% optimized.
I’m officially losing my mind and I need your expertise to finally get some sleep.
The Setup:
Platform: Hardcoded tag on head and body
Features: Custom Loader and Cookie Keeper are active with anti-adblock, SameOrigin, and custom domain
Status: Stape Support confirmed that the server container integration is fully active and the AdBlocker bypass is enabled.
The Conflict: Despite the container being “perfectly functional” according to Support, they also claim that:
“We did not find any events on your website that are generated specifically by the server container; they are generated only by the web container.”
My Evidence (The “Why am I seeing this?” part):
sGTM Debugger: For events like page_view and purchase, I clearly see Outgoing Requests being sent from the Server to Google’s servers.
Stape Backend: I can see the event logs and traffic activity in my Stape dashboard.
The “Double” Request: In the Network tab, I see requests going to my custom server endpoint, BUT I also see requests going directly from the browser to Google (google-analytics.com).
My Questions:
Why does Support say there are “No Server Events” if I can see them in my Stape logs and the sGTM Debugger shows Outgoing Requests?
Browser Requests: Why is the browser still sending hits to Google if the server_container_url is configured? I noticed even Stape’s own website has some requests hitting Google servers—is this expected or is it a “leak” in my configuration?
Anti-Adblocker Status: Is this “hybrid” behavior (both browser and server requests) or should I aim to completely eliminate the browser-to-google hits to maximize the Anti-Adblocker benefits? That’s what I’m trying to do but I can’t find the problem.
Since I’m “Level 0” and the system won’t let me upload more than one screenshot here, I’ve hosted all the sGTM Debugger screenshots (Outgoing Requests) and Stape Dashboard logs directly on the test page below.
The page is set up to automatically trigger purchase and view_item events. If anyone can point out what I’m missing to make this setup “100% Server-side,” I would be eternally grateful.
Test Page (includes Screenshots + Purchase/View_item triggers):Pagina di Test
@giovaniortolani sorry for pinging you, but I saw your thorough answers on the forum and I’m officially asking for your help or, as mentioned, help from anyone else as well.
I’ve had a look at your test site and the screenshots
Why does Support say there are “No Server Events” if I can see them in my Stape logs and the sGTM Debugger shows Outgoing Requests?
Perhaps they were looking at the wrong URL or a part of the site where there are no events. It’s just a guess on my part. If you can see the logs and they’re clearly there, and the tracking checker confirms this, then you don’t have any issues with it.
Browser Requests: Why is the browser still sending hits to Google if the server_container_url is configured? I noticed even Stape’s own website has some requests hitting Google servers—is this expected or is it a “leak” in my configuration?
This is normal. To ensure a more accurate audience selection, some requests may still be sent directly when using server-side tracking. This is an automatic process handled by GA and Google Ads. You cannot control this in any way.
An example of such a request is shown in the screenshot.
Anti-Adblocker Status: Is this “hybrid” behavior (both browser and server requests) or should I aim to completely eliminate the browser-to-google hits to maximize the Anti-Adblocker benefits? That’s what I’m trying to do but I can’t find the problem.
This is about using the Custom Loader to protect your requests from ad blockers and to load gtm.js and gtag.js. On your test site, I can see that the Custom Loader is currently installed and the standard GTM loader is not present – so everything is set up correctly.
They are searching for /collect in the Dev tab. I just discovered that if I disable the adblock bypass in the Custom Loader, the /collect request from my domain appears.
However, if the option is enabled, the request is encrypted.
Here is the /collect request encrypted from my server when the adblock bypass option is enable in the Custom Loader. AND the unredacted request from my server when the adblock bypass option is disabled in the Custom Loader.
All of this kept me up at night. Their claim that the integration wasn’t working because there were no requests on the server made me doubt myself for a moment, and I ended up agreeing with them.
This was despite clearly seeing request usage in the Stape backend and both incoming and outgoing requests in the logs.
