As global regulations continue to place constraints on data collection and processing, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to assert better control over their first-party data architectures. In response, many global advertisers are beginning to migrate to server-side tag management and the leading platform, Server-side Google Tag Manager (ssGTM).
Server-side tag management provides complete control over what data is sent to which platforms, leading to many potential compliance benefits. The capability to remove any kind of personal identifiers (including IP addresses) before sending measurement data on to partners like Google and Meta is particularly appealing to many privacy officers. While the additional control can help mitigate compliance risks, the server-side tag management architecture also moves data flows to an advertiser-owned server environment, making it very difficult to document data collection in practice and maintain a defensible position for compliance in the event of an action being filed.
To solve this, Tag Inspector is happy to announce Server-side GTM Monitoring. With the new feature, Tag Inspector users can add a Server-side GTM configuration to their account. Any configuration added is available to apply to any scans run. Once applied, reporting in Tag Inspector gives full visibility into exactly what data is sent to which platform by tags configured in the server-side context. Reporting can be used to validate that compliance policies are followed in practice and provide explicit documentation of compliant data collection.
Tag Compliance Policy monitoring in the Tag Inspector Governance Module also allows for proactive monitoring of data collection via the Server-side GTM architecture to identify any unauthorized data collection. Violations are highlighted within Tag Policy reporting with details of the violation to be leveraged by technology teams for the remediation process.
Server-side tag management is a means to enhance first-party data collection for advertisers in the shifting privacy environment. Compliance processes should not have to suffer in service of enhanced consumer data collection. Mitigate the compliance risk inherent to server-side tag management with Tag Inspector’s new Server-side Google Tag Manager Monitoring.
