Server to server tracking

[fahiraw]

I have a wordpress website and I want to write php code that will be sending data directly to sGTM bypassing wGTM completely.

Now, this post here talks about using webhooks: Data Tag / Webhook to GA4 Advanced Tag

And based on the answer from Dan:

1. Yes, by all means for Google Ads Offline. Both from Data Tag and from Webhook.
2. Webhook + GA4 Advanced. I mean it would work yes, it’s just set your expectations correctly: it will unlikely mirror normal GA4 functionality and there’s a lot of data you’d need to map manually if you’re aiming for parity with normal gtag hits.

From this I understood that to use GA4 tags the data client needs to be GA4 client otherwise the default behavior might not work…

Coming to my question, I plan to use measurement protocol to send data to GA4 client:

When using this approach, do I still create a dataLayer and send it over to sGTM via measurement protocol?

And when the data arrives, I assume I can just use it from the GA4 client and pass it forward to GA Ads and GA4 tags to report data back to GA ads and google analytics…

I don’t have to use google ads offline conversions in this case since I’m sending the data with measurement protocol…

For context, here’s for example the code I use to send page view events to GTM, and I would modify this code to use measurement protocol and my server side URL to send the data over to sGTM, will this work?

[Dan]

Hello,

1. You don’t need to create a dataLayer etc. if your goal is to not use web gtm. You could also consider using our PHP SDK to send those events: Apps, plugins and extensions of Stape

2. Whether you send it with measurement protocol or not, native Google Ads Conversion tag will not function properly. It’s not only a matter of which client claims the requests, it the request itself that should be gtag-generated to work properly. Measurement protocol should not be treated as main way of reporting, it was not built for that purpose.

[fahiraw]

Hey Dan, thank you very much for your response.

Okay now I see the bigger picture. So in essence, speaking from a practical point of view there’s no way we can implement true server to server tracking for GA4 because we can’t add all appropirate data that’s needed because we can’t even see which data needs to be sent and how to send it…

BUT, we can create server to server tracking for google ads using google ads offline conversions tag and for facebook using facebook CAPI, right?

And the data would not be sent as a data layer because the data layer is specific only for web container, instead the data will be sent in a JSON format…

Did I understand this correctly?

[Dan]

BUT, we can create server to server tracking for google ads using google ads offline conversions tag and for facebook using facebook CAPI, right?

correct

And the data would not be sent as a data layer because the data layer is specific only for web container, instead the data will be sent in a JSON format…

dataLayer is a webGTM specific things, yes. It doesn’t matter how you send data to the server container so long as you can map it correctly to whatever destination tags you’re going to use

[fahiraw]

Awesome man really appreciate you.

And for google analytics I guess we need to use the hybrid mode with webGTM then send the data over to sGTM and from there report it to GA4, right?

[Dan]

For full fledged GA4 functionality - yes. In this case you can also run the normal Googel Ads Converisons tags, off of that incoming GA4 signal

[fahiraw]

Awesome man thank you very much.

My current setup is like that, however I wanted to learn server to server and also for some clients I do want to set it up cause their WP website is messing things up and not allowing the current setup to work normally.

Again thank you.