Google Tag Gateway Tutorial – Pros & Cons + Step-by-Step Setup

Key Takeaways

Hey there, I'm Benjamin from Love Data. In this video, we're going to take a closer look at Google Tag Gateway. You'll learn what it is, the pros and cons, and I'll also walk you through the steps to set it up using Cloudflare with Google Tag Manager. I'll also share some of my own findings, including why I don't currently recommend Tag Gateway as a way to bypass ad blockers, but why it can still be worth using to improve your data accuracy. You might be wondering, what is Google Tag Gateway? Google has introduced this feature, so your Google tags load from your own domain instead of Google's. This turns them into first-party tags, and it works with Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Tag Manager. Normally, these tags are loaded from external domains like googletagmanager.com. The problem with this is that many browsers and ad blockers will block or restrict third-party scripts, which means your analytics and ad tracking can miss important data. But with Google Tag Gateway, those same tags load from your own website's domain. In this example, we can see the tags are now loaded from the same domain instead of the external Google domain. This can help improve data collection. Before we cover the setup steps, let's look at the pros and cons of Google Tag Gateway. Benefits include, if you're already using Cloudflare, it's easy to set up and it only takes a few steps. There are no extra costs, so unlike server-side tagging, you don't need a separate server. It can improve data accuracy. In a test I ran, I saw an improvement of almost 7% in the number of users being reported compared to a standard setup. But there are also some limitations. This includes minimal impact on ad blockers. I'm currently researching this, and from what I've seen so far, Tag Gateway doesn't do much to get around ad blockers. So I don't recommend using it for that purpose right now. If you're already running server-side tagging with GTM, you don't need to use Tag Gateway. So that means it's not always necessary. And if you're not using Cloudflare, setup can be more complex. And it only works for Google tags, so it won't help with third-party tags. If you'd like me to create a follow-up video showing how you can reduce the impact of ad blockers, please let me know in the comments below. Overall, if you're using Cloudflare and you're not using server-side tagging, I recommend setting up Tag Gateway. It's quick and easy to enable, plus it can improve the accuracy of your data. Okay, now let's walk through the steps to set up Tag Gateway using Cloudflare. Let's head to Google Tag Manager. Before you follow these steps, you'll need to make sure your website's domain has already been added to Cloudflare. If your domain isn't already set up with Cloudflare, I recommend doing that first. Now we need to navigate to admin. Under container, at the very bottom, we can see Google Tag Gateway. Let's select this. Now let's click continue. If we click the arrow to the right of the first step, we can see the measurement path that will be used for our tags. This is where the tags will be served from on our website. The main thing to check is that this path isn't already being used for something else on your website. If it is, then you should change it. Like the path that's suggested, I recommend using something that's random. So something that isn't obviously used for tracking or measurement. Since I'm not currently using this path on my website, I can continue to the next step. This is where we authorize access to Cloudflare. Let's click sign in to Cloudflare. You'll now need to enter your email address and password for Cloudflare, and log in. Now we need to click allow. We're taken back to Google Tag Manager. And we need to click choose domains. You'll need to select your domain. If you have multiple domains added to Cloudflare, then just select the same domain you've installed the Google Tag Manager container on, and click done. We can now see the domain we've selected, so let's click complete setup. Google Tag Gateway is now active, and Cloudflare will automatically add some additional code to our website to ensure Google Tag Gateway is configured. Let's open a page on my demo site to see this. And let's right-click to view the source code. We can see the extra code Cloudflare has added for our Google Tag Gateway configuration. One last thing I recommend is adjusting your Google Tag Manager container code. This is because the container code still uses the googletagmanager.com domain. We can see the measurement path included in the code that Cloudflare added. Let's copy this. Now let's edit the code for this page on my demo site. We can see the default Google Tag Manager container, so we just need to edit this. We're going to remove the full domain used for the container, including the gtm.js. And we're going to replace this with our measurement path. Now let's save this. And let's open Tag Assistant. Now we can connect to the page on my demo site. The page loads. And let's open the Tag Assistant tab. Now let's select the Google Analytics tag that fired. And let's open the page view hit. We can see this hit has been collected using our measurement path, so we know everything is working correctly. Our Google tags are now running through Google Tag Gateway. From what I've seen so far, it's not going to solve the issue of ad blockers, but it is a straightforward way to improve the reliability of your Google Analytics and Google Ads tracking. Remember, if you're already using server-side GTM, you don't need to use Tag Gateway. But if you're not and you have access to Cloudflare, then it's definitely worth setting up. And please let me know in the comments if you'd like me to create a follow-up video showing how you can reduce the impact of ad blockers. If you'd like to learn more about advanced tagging, you can check out my Google Tag Manager course. I've included a link in the description below. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.