Couple of weeks ago I had a play with getting server side GTM live for http://gtmrecipecontainers.com/  and thought it would be worth sharing a snapshot view of the process

For Google Analytics set-up I have the following:
1)GA for client
2)GA 4 for client
3)GA for client and server

I created a server side GTM container in addition to the client side GTM container

This is how my Client GTM container set-up looks

This is how my Server GTM container set-up looks in addition you also need to set-up a Google Cloud project so you can set-up an app engine implementation

Then when I test server side GTM with a test pageview hit

In real time Client and Server-Side GA I can see the test pageview hit

In the client GTM the Client and Server-Side GA tag got to add the end-point from the server-side GTM into the tags under transport URL which sends the hits to

Then the process is to activate an app engine within Google cloud using cloud shell. With me doing a test I only went for minimum and maximum of 1 server to keep the costs down.

One of the advantages of going server side you can use your own domain. Then I verified my domain under my hosting http://krystal.co.uk  by a creating a txt record

In Google Cloud my sub domain has been verified adding an SSL certificate

Then the final step is adding DNS records 4 x A and 4 x AAAA records

Then the final step in server-side GTM was to change the tagging server URL

Once I added the DNS records and went to preview mode in my server-side GTM this was what I was seeing

Checking on http://dnschecker.org  I realised I had an additional DNS record 77.72.0.66 which was pointing in-correctly and causing an error when I was testing

Once the record was removed then went back to server-side GTM now its firing with the sub domain

Using a 1 server and my traffic being negligible my avg cost per day is £1.08 so in 12 days since launching my cost is £11.57 with a forecasted cost of around £35 for December 2020

Traffic to site is low

For the month of December 22 days, 21 full days server side GTM has cost me £22 (£26 incl vat)

The volume of traffic for December is negligible with 35% of traffic coming via tag assistant

Mini thread on how to stop server side GTM https://twitter.com/mrdipeshashah/status/1346531195358752773