Ivanna Holubovska
AuthorA common issue for data analytics and sales managers is the accurate tracking of user behavior and conversions. And often, they might face a problem that seems to have no solution. Or alternatively, there are no developers who can do this, and the next update of the site is planned only for next month.
If you are familiar with the Google Tag Manager, you can send events to your CRM using Сustom HTML, but this is a very insecure method because anyone can see the requests data and where they are going. Also, you can’t use API keys for sending data to secure webhooks. Besides, it slows down your site performance because you add additional requests that the browser must handle.
Use GTM Server Side to securely send event/conversion data from any source (site, mobile, other services) to your CRM or any other URL.
We have many requests from our clients to send event data on conversion to their in-house CRM. And we started using the standard “HTTP Request Tag” for that purpose. After some time, we understood that in most cases, it is enough. That is if all data from the event can be sent in JSON Body to the desired URL. And that is why we created a JSON HTTP request tag.
It sends a POST request to your URL with a JSON body with all event data that came to the GTM client. We also implement the ability to add your custom request headers and data.
Where I can get it
You can find the tag on GitHub and of course, we submit it to the Community Template Gallery and expect that it will be shown on it after Google turns on Template Gallery for GTM Server Side.
How the request body will look like
For example, “pageview” event data that comes to the destination URL will look like this:
{
"x_ga_protocol_version": "1",
"x_ga_system_properties_v": "j86",
"x_ga_system_properties_u": "YEBAAEABAAAAAC~",
"x_ga_system_properties_gid": "958953488.1603993537",
"x_ga_system_properties_r": "1",
"x_ga_page_id": 618701935,
"x_ga_request_count": 1,
"page_location": "https://stape.io/",
"language": "ru-ru",
"page_encoding": "UTF-8",
"page_title": "GTM Server Side - GTM Server",
"x_ga_mp1_sd": "24-bit",
"screen_resolution": "1920x1080",
"x_ga_mp1_vp": "1920x866",
"x_ga_mp1_je": "0",
"x_ga_mp1_jid": "75289892",
"x_ga_mp1_gjid": "2061012404",
"client_id": "RQqpiKuM+uSEmRZWY8CJcMC0+90vEmBUdzTJRyMXlM=.1603993594",
"x_ga_measurement_id": "UA-111147971-1",
"x_ga_gtm_version": "2wgae3PDXX4BG",
"x_ga_mp1_z": "2079427983",
"event_name": "page_view",
"ip_override": "1.2.3.4",
"user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.111 Safari/537.36",
"x_ga_path": "j",
"x_ga_js_client_id": "796605102.1603993594"It is important to know that the tag flattens all nested objects with “_” that came from the client. For example:
{
'test': {
'gtm': 'tag'
}
}
Will send in a request like this:
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