How To Setup Server Side Tracking For Google Ads Using Stape.io And Google Tag Manager

How To Create & Set Up GTM Server Container

The first thing we need to do is to create a Google Tag Manager Serves Container. So log in to your tag manager account, select the account where you want to make the container, click Admin and create a new Container.

Then name your container (enter your website name or whatever), select Server and click create.

Next select Manually provision tagging server, copy your container config code and save it somewhere in a notepad, you’ll need this later.

After that you need to create a server container at Stape.io. 

Log in to your account, or create one if you don’t have one already (you can register and start this for completely free), go to GTM Containers and click on the Create container button.

Then name your container, add your GTM container config code that  you copied and saved from your Google Tag Manager container, select the server’s location and click create container.

It takes 5-10 minutes max to deploy the container, after that you should see the status ‘’Running’’

Once it’s running you can click on the container to see your default Tagging Server URL.

You can use this if you don’t have a custom domain, however, I highly recommend setting up a custom domain for this. You probably already have your website that you want to use for server side tracking, so what you can do is simply create a subdomain and use that as your custom Tagging Server URL.

In our case the website is iamaffiliate.com so we are going to use a subdomain gtm.iamaffiliate.com and use that as the tagging URL.

To set this up, open the sGTM container on Stape, scroll to the domains section, type the domain name, and click Add domain. Once done, you will see DNS records that you should add.

You can choose from setting CNAME or A records setup.

After that go back to your Google Tag Manager Server container, go to admin and click container settings.

And paste your Tagging server URL you just created.

If you use a custom domain for your tagging URL, it’s highly recommended to update the Web GTM script on your website, it will make gtm.js load from your domain.

To do this, simply replace the default googletagmanager.com in the script with your domain.

The next step is connecting your Tag ID. Go to GTM and select your Web container and create a new tag and select Google Tag as your tag type.

Then add your GA4 Tag ID (to find it go to Google Analytics → Admin → Property settings → Data collection → Data streams.)

In the Configuration settings add the following parameters:

• Name: server_container_url
• Value: your tagging server URL

Add a trigger to fire Pageview on All Pages and click save.

Next you need to set up the GA4 event. Create a new Tag selecting Google Analytics: GA4 Event type, add your GA4 tag ID and the event name you want to send (in our case it’s add_to_cart). You can find the list of standard event names here.

Also create a custom (add to cart) event for triggering.

Also create a custom (add to cart) event for triggering. In our case it’s AddToCart event, so whenever someone clicks on the Sign Up or Join Now button on our landing page:

they will land on iamaffiliate.com/amember/signup

so we are going to configure the trigger like this:

Next you need to create a GA4 client. Go to your server container, click client, create GA4 client and save.

Then create and set up a new GA4 tag, add your Tag ID, and choose a variable in Event Name settings

and add a trigger: Client Name equals GA4

To verify the setup, open the Server container preview mode and check that you see GA4 requests. Publish updated inside server and web Google Tag Manager containers.

If all is good, you can proceed to the next step, which is setting up the conversion linking.

How To Set Up Conversions Linking

So go to your Server container in GTM, add a new tag, select Conversion Linker tag type, and set the Triggering to fire Page View on All Pages.

Create Your Google Ads Conversion Action

Next before you create a Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag, if you haven’t yet, you need to configure a conversion action in Google Ads. To do that go to your Google Ads account, select Goals, Conversions and add New conversion action.

In our case we are going to set up an AddToCart event for this example. When it’s done you need to click on Tag setup and select Use Google Tag Manager, and copy the Conversion ID and Conversion Label and save them somewhere.

Create a Google Ads Conversion Tracking Tag

Now you can create your Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag in Server container GTM. So create a new tag and enter your Conversion ID and Conversion Label:

For the Triggering you can set up a Custom Event and enter the event name (add_to_cart in our case)

Click save and that’s it, now if you followed all the steps, your Google Ads server side tracking should work.

How To Test Your Setup

To test your setup open the Server container preview mode and check that the Google Ads Conversion tag triggered 

and the request it sent is correct.

Now this is just one example for setting server side conversion tracking for an AddToCart event, you can configure all kinds of custom conversions and events, following the same steps.