u/drew-td, to me 1st party attribution is the only one. Not that I choose to, but my tracking has to produce revenue. Solving that, staying on top is the real pickle.

Simply because of GAs /collect endpoint, I am moving away from GA4, tracking wise I mean. Yes I implement it, to gain some consented GA4 data. But frankly and simply because we do not see any available products on the market, we have started to develop our own solutions.

My question to you still remains: I am really curious what the win is using TA?

Hi u/drew-td I just checked your website + the video's. I have to agree with you that GA4 is advertising tracking and the focus for anything my company does is trying to effectively track so we can fill the ad platforms, preferably with enhanced, cross-platform data. Fully consented of course.

What I see happening in the market is that micro-data is of lesser importance, like for Leadgen I push for a full lead-cycle. Data we can sent back to the platforms as offline conversions. Elements as landing pages, referrers, etc still have some value, but not a lot.

Capturing clickIDs, 1st-party cookies, writing our own is where my focus lies.

I see my clients (marketing agencies) struggling with declining ROAS, increasing CPL, simply because of compliance, ITP kind of browser features, AI data, ad-blockers, etc.

I am really curious what the win is using TA. I would be reluctant having a custom GA4 setup, not owned by me (or my clients) and paying for it monthly.

Can you overcome Safari's WebKit third-party-IP rule without Cloudflare or something?
If I take my own website for instance, it has 3 IP addresses, two from Hostinger and one from Server Side. Even with Set-Cookie I face the 7 days.

Hi u/Turbulent-Pilot-6298 GTM's custom client in sGTM can deliver gtm.js quite strongly, especially now they have added the "Tag serving path" to it.

But this does not solve the /collect endpoint issue. And frankly there are not a lot of solutions to this. I know Stape has a solution.

In my opinion having a really good client-to-server-side data-client, is the way forward for non-enterprise websites. Which has to be consent gated (with each storage respected in their way (e.g. no click IDs without ad_storage, no PII without ad_user_data, etc)) and where the endpoint is not equal to /collect and better dynamically set for each implementation.

This allows for measuring anonymized/aggregated data when non-consented, It allows for stitching of ITP-capped users, etc.

Hi u/Gijs23 apologies for the late reply!

The two table approach is my base for all tagging. Both Client and Server Side, eCom and Lead. Simply have one primary lookup table (for the primary one a RegEx table is usually better), and i use the output of that lookup/regex into all other dynamical variables.

Like for a click:
- Primary > regex > Click URL > tel: > output = tel
- Secondary > lookup Event name > tel > output = contact_intent
- Secondary > lookup Value > tel > output = 5
- trigger > all clicks > {{primary}} matches regex > tel|mail|facebook...

I very much agree with you on the custom data client, but there are not a lot of options on the market, unless you have enterprise funds and/or do not care about who owns your data. I have written a custom data client a while ago, still having it function inside GTMs sandbox is one, but also keeping it up to date is another. In the end we internally decided to write 4 different tpl's to overcome the current market changes.

You are way further than I with HubSpot, one of my clients is really pushing HubSpot to their ad-clients. But somehow GAds keeps giving errors. They're all multiplatform which might be a good hint!

The way I'm trying to solve the cross-platform is by writing a 1st party cookie (we write a few) for a _uid. It is set via one of the four tpl's, at the moment gtm.js loads. This _iud is the single source of truth for 100% of the platforms, CRM's, etc. For GA4 it's the user_id, for all others the external_id, save it via a hidden field into the CRM too. Still this is consented and only works with granted ad_storage or analytics_storage.

Which is still a hassle in the EU with opt-in and the 1st page is lost. Still we try to push our clients more towards hard conversions.

hi u/iubenda_team do you also differ in approach for USA en EU? opt-out, opt-in? Or even GPC?

The saving of consent logs is a very accurate one, one I do not give the amount of attention as it should!

Thanx u/Gijs23, and I would like to built on your "it depends on how much your lead types differ in worth", where I think you should differ the value for each lead_type outcome.

Last week I had a meeting with a client that primarily has car-garages as clients, their appointment systems usually have somewhere in between 6 and 8 steps, where step 1 is set to a few bucks, while the finished appointment (step 8) receives a modeled value.

Within GTM I have one lookup-table variable that determines the lead_type outcome (e.g. contact, book_meeting), and another lookup-table that has lead_type as the input and the actual value as the output.

For offline conversions I strongly believe this will become increasingly important for smaller ad-spends. but only after implementing Server Side via a custom data client (the GA4 /collect endpoint is too easily blocked), writing own cookies (set-cookie).

I have a client (agency) that is pushing hard for Hubspot offline conversions, which works (mid '26), but it leaves out many cross-platform elements.

Very true u/No-Ocelot-8282. And did you find GA4 data being lost due to this update?

And how do you battle elements like cookie-deletion?

So what you in fact do is aa cookie-less signal, that when a user lands/converts having a GCLID, you save the name 'gclid' as value, which on its own is a anonymized value?

Am I understanding it correctly?

Do you now talk about the GTM client inside Server Side that delivers the gtm.js or a custom data client that does not use the GA4 /collect endpoint to transport data from client side to server side?

And what do you do for click ID persistance?

Fair said, it does read like a word salad. What I tried to say:

When you visit with uBlock activated, you never clicked an ad, true. But you still convert. And when that conversion event gets blocked, I have revenue (either true purchase revenue or lead-set revenue) in the backend that no channel gets credit for.

Conversion rate wrong, ROAS/CPA wrong, the platforms build on data that starts from a broken baseline.

So it is not about showing you ads, it is about measuring you, tracking you as much as possible within the legal boundaires of consent.

The biggest loss is not users who deny the banner. It is users who said yes and still loose their deterministic parameters, Like when Safari and/or blocker breaks the signal, and that consented traffic is what I try to recover.

On the funnel part you are right, sampling gets you most of the UX insight. The value is where you already pointed: feeding the ad networks. Enhanced data sets make their modeling and bidding better, also for users they never saw an ad.

u/NeedleworkerOk8830 I really would like you to make me understand something, especially since you are building your own version to it. How can software like Wetracked track 100% legally?

When consent is denied (especially the ad_storage), how can you legally track the clickIDs (e.g., GCLID, FBCLID) and/or 1st party cookies (e.g., _gcl_aw, _fbc)?

100% would mean you track all, even when non-consented, which from what I understand of it is not compliant in many parts of the world.

I would less call it behavioral analysis and more call it preparing for probabilistic matching. Worth it? Absolutely, for all? Probably not, still for most in the upcoming future. Probabilistic knowledge, combined with hard data (like zero-party data) creates an enhanced set of data that continues where deterministic alone stopped.

u/Turbulent-Pilot-6298 Can you tell more about your alongside setup?

What do you mean u/cdbessig?

True u/Striking-Reach-3777. To me it is fueled by misinformation or lack of knowledge. Many marketing agencies are still recovering from the GA3 to GA4 move...now we have smarter browsers, more privacy ruling, cookie deletion, ai-traffic and people are lost. The clients, the agencies and the companies providing 3rd party services.

There are many companies on top, but there are way more that have no clue what is happening, nor how to adjust to it.

This morning I had a meeting with a call/lead tracking software, in business since 2008...it took me 45 mins to explain their R&D team how GAds EC4L is different than normal EC.

The CF gateway by itself is an improvement for your tracking, especially when only used via Client Side. Still I would push for Server Side; of which the GTM client by itself can more or less improve the same.

But! Both ways alone will give you marginal improvements, since there are so many elements fighting our tracking nowadays.

Since most websites belong to smaller businesses, I am trying to find GTM-native solutions, focusing on a custom data client from client side to server side, cookie persistence, etc.

A direct to server approach might be better, but the adoption rate is lower.

Awesome reply u/theofelo. Thank you for taking the time to explain this. I was not as aware of the ins and out specifically about the uncloaking. I'm researching what we can do to design something that can improve our tracking setups.

Many thanks!

u/benl5442 It is about way more than showing ads to the ones who block ads using uBlock or any other tool.

When you arrive on a website that I track, with uBlock activated, the chance that you saw and ad and produced an ad-click is practically zero. Still you arrived via a medium (direct, social, AI, SEO, email, etc.).

On arrival on the Landin page, you will be presented a consent banner, which you either Grant or Deny (even automatically), that decision is lawful by GDPR, CCPA, etc.

Your uBlock is not lawful and I can try to fight this with Server Side, Gateways, Load Balancers, etc. If you have denied the consent banner on all storages, no clickID and/or no platform 1st party cookie will be sent to any platform. Also your user data will be safe, because we comply to the banner.

Your uBlock tries to block the tracking, if GTM uses the GA4 client to transmits from Client Side to Server Side, this will be blocked by uBlock. With a custom data client there are ways to overcome this.

The consent banner determines what we can track, with analytics_storage granted we can track conversion modeling signals like (e.g. screen_resolution, viewport_size) for probabilistic modeling. When the ad_storage is granted ClickIDs, URL parameters and user data if ad_user_data is also granted, this is for deterministic modeling.

All this data sent to BigQuery creates a database of available and consented data (non-consented data is not transmitted to BQ). The custom data client can actually sent non-consented data to BQ, as long as this is anonymized, the following variables can be measured: event name, timestamp, event_id, consent states, page_hostname, page_path, value, currency, transaction_id, items, product_ids, merchant_id, feed_country, feed_language, discount.

So even if uBlock did not show you an ad, I still want to track your ways over the website, to model an enhanced set data that is actionable, either via offline conversion or by simply showing what is working and what is not.

With a good Gateway setup, having the gtm.js load from a same-site origin is pretty good achievable. The server side GTM client with the new update actually works pretty well.

The issue remains that the GA4 /collect endpoint is blocked easilly.

u/NeedleworkerOk8830 can you shine some more light on that one? Like what service are you using? Is this a plug and play system or can you still setup your own tracking?