Improve the performance and speed of your website with Google's Server-Side tagging.

In order to measure the effectiveness of a campaign and understand the consumer journey, many advertisers work with a variety of technology partners. Doing so requires such businesses to directly enter JavaScript code, also known as "third-party tags," on your website, which is written by one of these partners. 

However, when many tags are uploaded to a site, they can negatively affect user experience and conversion rates. Also, because third-party tags run directly on the advertiser's website, they have access to a large amount of information entered on that page. That is why it is important that companies have control over the information that these labels can access. 

To help you address these challenges there is a tool within Google Tag Manager called Server-Side, also known as Google's server-side tagging. This application allows you to move many of the third-party tags off your website and host them on the Google Cloud server.

This means that when your customers interact with one of your pages, the third-party tags are loaded directly into the container on the server instead of on your site. This allows you to provide faster load times, greater security for your customer data, and some additional data controls. 

Give your customers more speed on your site

When you remove third-party tags from your website, less data needs to be loaded when users enter your pages, which translates into faster loading speeds. A investigation study Recent shows that a decrease in mobile page load times improved progression rates at each step of the conversion funnel, for all brands surveyed. In fact, for mass consumption businesses, each reduction of 0.1 seconds in the loading speed of a mobile site meant an average increase of 10% in the purchase order. 

Consider a mass consumer e-commerce that works with many technology partners to run marketing campaigns and measure customer behavior. Whenever this store wants to work with a new partner, for example to run email marketing campaigns, it must add a new third-party tag on its site, to measure performance. Instead, this merchant can place the new tag on the Tag Manager's server, so when the user loads their website, this tag will run on the server after the page has loaded. This process allows companies to measure the success of their campaigns without affecting the customer experience. 

Secure your customer data

When customers interact with your online store, they share certain information with you. For this reason, it is important that you protect your data so that only authorized partners can access it. 

When third-party tags are implemented directly on your site, they can access and interact with other information about your customers. This is how Server-Side labeling protects labels hosted on a secure server, limiting their access to the data that your customers enter on the site. Additionally, because the tags are placed on the server, you can gain visibility into what data is being collected and where this information is being sent. 

Control the behavior of third-party tags

The Tag Manager allows you to control the behavior of third-party tags through a ready-to-use tag template version of JavaScript. These templates are available to the entire community and have a permission template for all third-party tags.

Every tag you add to your server's container will have to declare how it behaves. For example, which cookies you access or where you can send the data. In addition, automatic guidelines of what the labels can do can be established. This allows you to keep the same permissions as the previously loaded ones when adding new tags, so you don't have to continually check the behavior of the tags in the future. 

Get started with tag storage on the server

Tag storage is available for all Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360 accounts. To activate it, you must log into your Tag Manager account and create a new server container and connect it with an account in the cloud, be it new or existing. 

I hope this tool helps you optimize the user experience you give your customers and that this also improves your conversions. Write me in the comments if you want to know more about how to optimize and measure your Google campaigns.