Power-ups
The eleven switches on your measurement server: what they do, what they send along, and which two leave something out instead of adding it.
Power-ups are the switches on your measurement server. Four stand alone, seven put a header on the request your measurement server forwards. Everything they send along is derived from what the browser already sent — nothing extra is collected from the visitor.
The four that stand alone
Custom Loader
Serves your snippet from a path that differs per measurement server, so ad blockers cannot recognise it by filename.
On by default. If you switch it off on a server that is already running, your client’s site still asks for the old path — so change both together.
IP blocking
Traffic from the addresses you list gets a 403 and stays out of the figures. Useful for your own office. Note that blocked traffic still arrives at your measurement address and therefore counts; see Counting requests.
Multiple domains
More than one measurement address pointing at the same measurement server, for country sites for instance. See The measurement address.
Click ID Restorer
Keeps gclid and fbclid in a first-party cookie, so a conversion on page four
still knows where the visitor came from.
Enrichment
Add characteristics of the visitor to every measurement. Each switch sets one header on the request your measurement server forwards; in Tag Manager you read it back as a variable.
| Switch | Header | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Visitor’s operating system | X-Device-Os |
Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux or ChromeOS. Anything that cannot be placed is called Other. |
| Visitor’s browser | X-Device-Browser |
Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Opera or Samsung Internet — the same grouping as the browser split in Analytics. |
| Visitor’s browser engine | X-Device-Engine |
Blink, WebKit or Gecko. On an iPhone it is always WebKit, even when the visitor uses Chrome or Firefox. |
| Mobile or desktop | X-Device-Mobile |
true for a phone or tablet, false for a computer. A visit that cannot be placed is called unknown, not false. |
| Bot or human | X-Device-Bot |
true for crawlers and scripts that announce themselves as such. A bot posing as a visitor is not caught here. |
All five are derived from the visitor’s browser. Where the answer cannot be
given it says unknown — deliberately not false.
GDPR
These two leave something out instead. They decide what you forward about who came by.
Anonymise IP address
Truncates the last part of the address before it is forwarded, so the country can still be determined and the visitor cannot.
Google Analytics receives the address truncated anyway. What this changes is that your measurement server no longer sees the full address, and therefore neither does any tag running in it.
Anonymise user agent
Replaces the browser version and device model with a plain string that only still says what kind of device it is. Your own statistics here keep working, because they are determined before the header is replaced.