If you are considering server-side tracking, you will face the question of where to actually run it sooner or later. Stape, your own Cloud Run setup, or a completely different path? For some, Stape makes sense. For others, their own Cloud Run setup in Google Cloud Platform is the better option. And that is exactly what we will focus on in this article. We will go through the differences between Stape and Cloud Run and look in detail at everything you need to deploy server-side tracking on Cloud Run. We will focus on the things that are often missing from standard tutorials: how to name your servers, which region to choose, how much does running the server cost, when a load balancer is worth it, and how not to get caught out when choosing the billing type.
In the first part of our series on using first-party data in online advertising, we explained why first-party data is important for media targeting and improving campaign performance. In this part, we will take a closer look at how to collect first-party data correctly and send it to media systems. We will go through the full journey of first-party data, from the dataLayer through normalization and hashing to sending it via server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) to Google Ads and Meta. The goal is to give you a practical guide that you can implement right away, including code snippets, edge cases, and the places where things most often break in practice.
The cookie apocalypse and the many other attempts at coming up with an original name for the end of third-party cookies in Google Chrome thankfully stopped haunting our LinkedIn feeds sometime in early 2024. What it did do, however, was spark an industry-wide conversation about working with first-party data . That is proving to be a key step toward better measurement and stronger campaign performance today.