Configure GA4 in the server container

A server container has two kinds of building blocks. Clients read incoming requests and turn them into event data. Tags take that event data and send it to a vendor. Every request is claimed by at most one client.

A new server container already has a client named GA4 under Clients. It claims requests to /g/collect like the one below and creates one event per hit, with the event name, parameters, client ID and page details.

https://sgtm.example.com/g/collect?v=2&tid=G-XXXXXXXXXX&en=page_view&...

1. 1 Open your server container, go to Tags and click New.
2. 2 Choose Google Analytics: GA4 as the tag type.
3. 3 Leave Measurement ID empty to use the ID that arrives with each event, or enter G-XXXXXXXXXX to send everything to one property.
4. 4 Under Triggering, create a new trigger of type Custom that fires on Some Events, with the condition Client Name equals GA4.
5. 5 Name the tag, for example GA4 - all events, and save.

This one tag forwards every GA4 event: page views, sign_up, purchase and anything you add later in the web container. You do not need one server tag per event.

Because every hit passes through your server first, you can change it before Google sees it. None of this is required to get data flowing, so come back to it once the basics work.

• Redact visitor IP address in the GA4 tag removes the IP address from the event. GA4 then has no IP to derive location from, so geographic reports lose detail.
• Event Parameters in the GA4 tag let you exclude parameters you do not want to send and add or override values, for example to drop a parameter that contains personal data.
• Transformations (in the server container menu) apply rules to event data before tags read it. Exclude parameters removes fields for the tags you pick; Augment event adds or changes fields. One transformation can cover many tags, which keeps data minimisation in one place.

Open the GA4 client and look at Cookies and Client Identification. There are two modes:

• JavaScript Managed: the Google tag in the browser sets the _ga cookie and the client ID comes from it. Nothing changes compared to a normal GA4 setup.
• Server Managed: the server sets an HTTP-only FPID cookie on your domain and uses it as the client ID. Browser scripts cannot read it. Safari and iOS browsers still cap it at 7 days when your tagging subdomain is a CNAME, as it is on SGTM.space, so it does not keep the client ID longer there.

1. 1 Click Preview in the server container. Tag Assistant opens on your subdomain.
2. 2 In another tab open your site (or its web container Preview) and browse a few pages.
3. 3 In the server Preview, click a collect request on the left. The Request tab should show it was claimed by the GA4 client.
4. 4 Open the event under that request and check the Tags tab: your GA4 tag is listed under Tags Fired.
5. 5 Back on the Request tab, the Outgoing HTTP Requests from Server list shows a request to google-analytics.com with status 200 or 204.
6. 6 Click Submit and publish the server container.

Then open GA4 and check Reports, then Realtime. For a detailed view, go to Admin, then Data display and DebugView; sessions opened from GTM Preview are marked as debug traffic and appear there.

• The GA4 client claims the /g/collect requests.
• The GA4 tag fires with the trigger Client Name equals GA4.
• The outgoing request to Google returns a 2xx status (usually 200 or 204).
• Events show up in GA4 Realtime or DebugView.
• The server container is published, not only previewed.

If something is missing, the debugging lesson walks through each step of this path.