Getting started
From nothing to a measurement server that measures, in four steps, with who does which.
Setting up server-side tagging takes four steps. Two of them happen in Tagyard, one at your DNS provider and one in Tag Manager. Allow a quarter of an hour, plus the time your DNS needs to propagate.
1. Create a measurement server
A measurement server is your tagging and preview server together. You create one
per site. While creating it, Tagyard asks for the ID of your server container in
Google Tag Manager — it starts with GTM- and sits in Tag Manager under Admin,
with your server container.
No server container yet? Create that in Tag Manager first; Tagyard cannot make one for you, because it lives in your account.
2. Choose your measurement address
The measurement address is where your website sends its measurements. It is a
subdomain of your own domain, for example t.yourdomain.com.
That it sits under your own domain is the entire point of server-side tagging. Pick something short; you will see it in every request from now on.
3. Set the DNS record
Tagyard shows a CNAME record for you to put at your DNS provider. This is the
only step outside Tagyard, and the only one where something can be forgotten.
Two things go wrong here:
- The proxy is on. At Cloudflare the record has to be DNS only, not Proxied. With the proxy on, your traffic never reaches your measurement server and the certificate cannot be requested.
- The record is on the root domain. It belongs on the subdomain you chose in
step 2, not on
@.
Tagyard checks every thirty seconds whether the record is right. As soon as it is, the address flips to Address active.
4. Wait for the security
The certificate is only requested once your DNS really points at Tagyard — not before. That is deliberate: requesting a certificate for an address that points nowhere fails, and counts towards the issuer’s rate limit.
After the first visit it is there. From that moment you can point your server container in Tag Manager at your own measurement address, and traffic starts flowing.
How you know it works
At the top of your measurement server there is a verdict in plain language. As long as nothing has been measured, Tagyard says so — no green tick on absent data. See The verdict.