Standard Google Ads Remarketing server-side, using GTM Server Containers

Ever since the Server-side tagging was announced in mid 2020, Google and its entire community has been in its toes to come up with new enhancements and changes that can define the landscape for digital analytics and how the entire ecosystem will work.

In line with this, Google now came with the Google Ads Remarketing tag in Google Tag Manager server containers. You can consider this to be something similar to the Conversion Tracking Tag that was launched on July 2021. The Google Ads remarketing helps to re-engage with potential customers by adding the website and app visitors to remarketing lists.?

The Server-side Tag Manager helps to move the Google Ads Remarketing Tags from the webpage to server. This process will ultimately help remove unnecessary code in the page that ultimately make the page much heavier. In short, we can expect improvement around the page load times. Let’s understand how the entire setup process works that can define how to configure the Tag Manager web container and server container to use the Ads remarketing tag.

At the initial go, we need to have the Google Analytics - GA4 Config?tag in the web container to send data, configured with the 'Send to Server' container setting.

• Configure the GA4 configuration tag and
• Set up a trigger for the configuration tag.

Website Configuration Steps: The configuration can be standardized through the server-side implementation via Tag Manager or global site tags (gtag.js). To set up the tag in GA4 for server-side processing, we can follow the below steps:

• In a web container, add a GA4 Configuration tag, or edit an existing one.
• Select 'Send to Server' container checkbox and enter the Server Container URL into the corresponding text field.
• Save the tag and configure the trigger to fire on 'All Pages' trigger and then publish the container.

If on the other hand, we plan to go with gtag.js on the website, we can update either UA/GA4 config?command to send events to the server container. In either of the cases, we can add the?transport_url?and a?first_party_collection?parameters to the existing tag:

gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXX', 
? transport_url: 'https://analytics.example.com',
? first_party_collection: true
});{        

To proceed with the GA4 Client to respond for the GA scripts, we need to follow the below modifications to clients.

• In the server-side container, click Clients to view the list of clients.
• Next is to click the name of the client for which we need to edit
• Then select Default gtag.js paths for specific IDs.
• Next is to click Add Measurement ID and enter the ID.
• Finally, we need to save the client configuration and publish the container.

Now, to get the server container to respond to requests to load GTM scripts, we need to add the?Google Tag Manager: Web Container?client and make changes to the configuration. In the server-side container, click Clients to view the list of clients.

• Next click New in the Clients section and select Client Configuration section to choose a client type.
• Then select Google Tag Manager: Web Container from the list of available clients.
• Click Add Container ID and enter the GTM web container ID. This ID must match the ID that have been used in the HTML snippet mentioned above.
• Finally, we can save the client configuration and publish the container.

We can now move towards the Google Ads Remarketing tag running in the Server container. Below steps will help define the entire process.

• Firstly, we need to select the Tags on the left side of the page from the server container workspace
• Need to then select NEW and then the Google Ads Remarketing tag type
• We then need to enter the Google Ads Conversion ID and optional Conversion Label in the provided fields.
• Then select the triggers to specify when the tag should fire. For example, we can select a trigger that fires on all pages if we want to add a remarketing tag to every page of our website.
• Finally, we can update the Tag Name and click SAVE to complete the Tag setup.
• For final validation, we can then preview the changes and publish when ready.

Now once the implementation start sending remarketing data with the server container, and if you are finally satisfied that the Ads Conversion Remarketing tag has fired correctly, it can be said that the entire process has successfully validated and we are now good with the standard Google Ads remarketing process deployment.