Preface: this post is just a personal note, not an implementation guide.
I’ve been ringing the bell for Google Gateway for Advertisers for some time, excited about the possibility to address the ITP issue in iOS without much technical investment. That was until I was corrected by our tech team that, even though cookies are set 1st party with Google Tag Gateway, ITP recognizes when the cookie is set by the script and not by the serv… anyway, it does not do what I thought it would do.
I had implemented Google Tag Gateway on this blog post for some months and then, I had enough. After learning the only way for battling this ITP shenanigans was server side, I deployed a basic server side implementation on this blog.
The first thing that comes to mind is, will this cost any money? I don’t have much traffic here, so hopefully I don’t incur any costs.
So, after all these trials and errors, I am double tracking to two different GA4 properties – one client and one server-side. I’m also using Google Tag Gateway. Let’s see how that goes.
Edit October 14, 2025
I’m just going to admit that I’ve been relying too much on engineers to share some of the details of the implementations.
- Changing the trigger in the sGTM from pageview to events (that’s why was not able to record enhanced measurement events).
- Adding the API secret to the client tag
- Modifying preview settings when in sGTM
Or for the tag gateway, forcing preview by going to https://tagassistant.google.com/…
Little things that make the big things work.
Leave a Reply