I would check if this is a local issue by testing your site on other devices and locations, you might have some ad blocker in place. There might also be something wrong with the site or your cookiebanner. Both should have some kind of help desk that you can contact

Yes, I'm certainly happy to do that! In the video I have three reasons that bring me to that conclusion. Let me go through each one of those below and provide them with more context and sources. Reason 1: Google Analytics has bugs or unexpected behaviour and Google is not transparent about what is going on. Two bugs in particular came to mind when I was making this video. First of all there is a bug where the Session Campaign dimension is set to '(organic)' for Google Ads traffic. Read more about that here: ppcnewsfeed.com/blog/fix-organic-not-set-google-ads-campaign-name-in-ga4/ Secondly there is an issue where a small percentage of traffic where Session Source / Medium is is attributed to '(not set)' after enabling Consent Mode. Most of the time this is between 2% and 5%, but in some cases this is 20% or more. See also this MeasureSlack thread for example: measure.slack.com/archives/C03AE85U5/p1725350182353769?thread_ts=1724915413.069189&cid=C03AE85U5 (If you don't have access, sign up here: join.measure.chat/). There are a lot more known issues with GA4, just like these. Google is silent about issues. Reason 2: Google is pushing lots of updates to Google Analytics, but is not clear what exactly is changing. Here is the changelog that I'm talking about: support.google.com/analytics/answer/9164320?hl=en For example, just search on this page for the word 'attribution'. You'll find that Google has been making lots of changes here. But they are often very vague about what exactly has changed and what the consequenses are for our reports. Reason 3: Google has introduced Sampling in the regular reports Of course, like you mentioned, sampling has always been a part of Google Analytics. But when GA4 replaced Universal Analytics, one of the big selling points was the fact that the regular reports where never sampled and therefore more accurate than before. However, in november 2023, Google changed this for high traffic sites: www.ga4bigquery.com/blog/newsletter-10/ I don't blame them, it's a free product. They can do whatever they want. But what if they decide to introduce heavier sampling starting tomorrow? These things bring me to the conclusion that it is not wise to 100% depend on Google Analytics for your reporting needs. Especially when there is a lot at stake. No need to switch, just a backup plan in case your GA4 reports break. To me, enabling BigQuery is a quick and easy way to have a plan B. However, in the video I briefly mention Piwik Pro as another low-cost alternative that you can set up parallel to GA4. I hope this helps.

In many cases you are probably right. The default setting on BigQuery (if you're not in sandbox) is indefinite. So if want to set a fixed retention period, that is something you manually need to do. Yesterday I came across this article that talks about making bulk changes to the expiry of all your tables. I've not used this so far, but might be helpful: www.teamsimmer.com/2022/11/15/how-do-i-change-the-table-expiration-in-google-bigquery/ And as always; check with your legal advisor on this to be sure. Especially in the context of for example regional legislation, the data you collect and the purpose. But in general data is not anonymized in bigquery. It doesn't store IP addresses, but it does sometimes store identifiers (User ID, Transaction ID). In those cases it is possible to link with other datasources that contain PII.

Which events aren't deduplicated? All of them or some of them? And if you are testing your setup via Tag Assistentd, do you see the Event ID is sent along with the proper tags?

@@LeonKorteweg Thank you for your response! Unfortunately, none of the standard events are being deduplicated (this is a setup for a WordPress e-commerce site using WooCommerce). In Tag Assistant, I am sending the unique Event ID with each Facebook and GA4 event. If you agree, I can send you screenshots of my setup via email or another method?

Hey there! Yes, I think I've responded. If not please email [email protected] 👍🏻

In this video I explain the whole process of setting up Stape and Server-side GTM: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGTCpaGInrqln9U I haven't personally used Meta Conversions API gateway. I prefer to use a tag manager instead. This way you are not limited to Meta Ads only but you can feed data into multiple destinations like GA4, Meta Ads, Google Ads all from one tool.

That should be possible, as long as that hosting has al the technical requirements. In my experience self-hosting is almost always more expensive and time consuming than the default solutions. Thats why I recommend Google Cloud or Stape over self-hosted solutions, unless there is a very pressing argument to go that route.

Hi Rens, No unfortunately I've never had this issue. I would double check if your tags are fired succesfully, because that means the token is OK even though it's the same one. Otherwise I'dd contact LinkedIn support to see if they can help.

@@LeonKorteweg Hi Leon. Thanks for the reply. Just as an FYI... we found the issue. By "automatically" importing a Google Ads tag (via their own 'wizard')... the SST connection got broken, which caused nothing to work. We didn't notice it because GA4 data did keep coming in Client side (because the tag added that one). Now we only have 1 token and it data seems to go to all of our accounts.

Yes, I call this concept 'delayed consent' and I cover this in this video (from around 8 minutes): kzbin.info/www/bejne/r5Pdp4Fnd9WAnMU

I haven't used that solution, but so far I've been able to get this custom method working with about every cookiebanner that I came across. The limitation is often your technical knowledge. If you find yourself lost, I'dd suggest to just follow the steps in their documentation to set things up 👍🏻

@@LeonKortewegThank you Leon 👍

The server-side GTM container is for routing, modifying and transforming events. However you cannot create new events out of nothing. You don't have click, scroll or form triggers for example. That's why you still need a client-side GTM container along with it.

@@LeonKorteweg So do I understand that right: you can have clientside-events without serverside but not vice versa?

Do you mean that there is no default command set before Window Loaded? If so, this is not good; tags before window loaded will very likely load, regardless of consent. So your site will not be compliant. This only happens if you hardcode your CMP and put the code at the bottom of your page, always put it above GTM, at the top of the page. Or this happens if you use GTM to load your CMP but don't use Consent Intialization - All Pages.

it does exist

@@romanboiarchuk2048no

@@romanboiarchuk2048 hello! I can't find this label.

I like both and find them very similar. From the top of my mind Simple Analytics is a bit stricter when it comes to privacy but as a result also less accurate with counting users.

Yeah I think deduplication is one of the hardest things to get right in a server-side GTM setup. If you look closely, you'll see that I'm using the config tag with send_page_view set to false. I'm sending the page_view event on cookie_consent_update. Check out the GA4 and Consent Mode video's in the description for a step by step explanation on this.

I've done a video on consent mode with cookiebot too. This video is here for those who have a custom cookiebanner, or for those who want to have more control in their setup.

Thanks! Yes, just search for 'Leon Korteweg' ;) most content in dutch though, but the translate function is quite good 👍🏻

At the end I talk a bit on this; usually I leave both enabled, with the server-side conversions set to secondary. So you can compare your old setup to your new server-side conversions. After a while you'll notice that server-side conversions start to attribute more conversions to your campaigns than the client-side tags. If that happens you can flip the client-side conversions to secondary and the server-side conversions to primary

@@LeonKorteweg Hi Leon, thanks for this. I have a followup question: We have both conversion linker + conversion tags + remarketing tag set on the server side GTM. Do we remove the existing remarketing and conversion linker on the client-side container? (note: no conversion tags, only remarketing and linker) thanks!