Configuring your tags on your server side container

The next stage in migrating to server side GTM is to configure all the tags you had in your web container inside your server side container. When configuring tags for your server side container, there are 3 main elements you will need to interact with. These are Clients, Triggers and Tags.

  • Clients
    • A client is responsible for receiving tags from your web container. How this is configured depends on what type of tags you are sending from your web container to your server side container. For example, if you are sending GA3 tags, you will need a GA3 client. Ideally you should only have 1 client set up for your website as your web container should be sending only 1 type of tag.
  • Triggers
    • These triggers differ from the triggers you will see in your web container. In the web container, you are typically listening for interactions or events that occur on your web page (e.g. link click). In server side GTM, a trigger is listening for an event coming from a client. These events can be differentiated by the client name, event name, query string and a number of other variables. There should be 1 trigger configured in your server side GTM for each event/page view etc that you are sending from your web container.
  • Tags
    • This is the final stage of the configuration where you set up tags to be fired based on the events that come in via the triggers. Server side GTM has a couple of tag configurations built in including GA3, GA4 and custom HTTP requests, but you can use the marketplace to try and find other configuration templates for a platform you might need (e.g. Facebook Conversions API).

Below is an example of what a tag setup using traditional GTM would look like and what it would look like after migrating to server side GTM:

Follow the steps below to configure each of the 3 elements in your server side container:

Client

  1. Go to tagmanager.google.com and select your server side container.
  2. On the side menu, click Clients then click the New button.
  3. Click the Client Configuration box and select the type of client you want to use.
  4. Name your client and click Save.
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Trigger

  1. Go to tagmanager.google.com and select your server side container.
  2. On the side menu, click Triggers then click the New button.
  3. Click the Trigger Configuration box and select the type of trigger you want to use. Most of the time this will either be Custom or Page View unless you have sent a custom event from your web container in which you would select Custom Event.
  4. Configure how you want to filter out which events to listen for by clicking the Some Events radio button all you can just listen for All Events.
  5. Name your trigger and click Save.

Tag

  1. Go to tagmanager.google.com and select your server side container.
  2. On the side menu, click Tags then click the New button.
  3. Click the Tag Configuration box and select the type of tag you want to use.
  4. Make any necessary changes to the configuration if needed.
  5. Click the Triggering box. Select the trigger(s) you want to fire this tag.
  6. Name your tag and click Save.