The shift to server-side tracking is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity. With browsers like Safari and Firefox aggressively limiting cookies and ad blockers wiping out up to 30% of your valuable data, relying on outdated client-side methods is a recipe for data loss and inaccurate marketing decisions.

Google's Server-Side Tag Manager (sGTM) on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a powerful foundation. But for many marketers, it's a bare-bones, complex solution that requires deep technical knowledge and often leaves critical gaps in their data.

This is where OATS comes in.

OATS is a full-featured, user-centric server-side tracking solution built on top of the sGTM framework, but engineered for simplicity and power. We don't just host your server container; we unlock a suite of proprietary features that the default GCP setup simply doesn't offer, giving you cleaner data, greater control, and unparalleled peace of mind.

Here's how OATS goes above and beyond to future-proof your marketing analytics:

1. Recovering Your Most Valuable Data: The UTM & Click ID Keeper

   Your ad campaigns are powered by crucial parameters like gclid, fbclid, and your UTMs. But in a client-side world, a visitor who clicks on your ad and then leaves your site before converting can lose that valuable campaign data. When they return later, you have no way to connect their conversion to your initial ad spend.

   The OATS Advantage: We employ a proprietary script that securely stores these key identifiers in a cookie on the user's browser as soon as they land. If they return to your site days, or even weeks later, OATS retrieves these identifiers, ensuring that your conversions are accurately attributed to the original campaign. The default GCP setup lacks this out-of-the-box functionality, forcing you to rely on custom, developer-built solutions.

2. Eliminating Bot Traffic for Clean Analytics

   Nothing skews your data and wastes your ad budget more than bot traffic. The default sGTM setup doesn't have a built-in mechanism for bot detection, leaving you to manually filter out bot activity in your analytics or rely on expensive third-party tools.

   The OATS Advantage: OATS includes an advanced, real-time bot detection system. It analyzes user behavior, IP addresses, and other signals to automatically identify and filter out non-human traffic. This means your Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and other platforms receive only clean, human-generated data, giving you a true picture of your website performance and campaign ROI.

3. Powering Customization with a Seamless Data Layer

   The data layer is the heart of your tracking setup, but populating it with custom elements can be a developer-heavy process.

   The OATS Advantage: We provide a proprietary script that simplifies the process of creating and populating a data layer. This means you can add custom data elements—from user subscriptions to product categories—without complex coding, giving you the granular data you need to power custom reports and audiences. This is a level of ease and customization not found in the basic sGTM configuration.

4. Bypassing Ad Blockers with a Custom GTM Loader

   Ad blockers and Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) are designed to block standard GTM scripts. While a custom domain helps, sophisticated ad blockers can still recognize the gtm.js script and block it from loading.

   The OATS Advantage: OATS provides a custom GTM loader that dynamically changes the name of the standard gtm.js script. This makes it significantly harder for ad blockers to detect and block your container, ensuring that your tracking script loads and captures data reliably. It's a simple change that makes a profound difference in data collection rates.

5. Unifying Your Data: Direct Integration with Your Data Warehouse

   You've collected all this clean, rich data—but where does it go? The default sGTM setup sends data to endpoints like Google Analytics and Facebook, but it doesn't provide a seamless way to store your raw event data in your own data warehouse for long-term analysis and business intelligence.

   The OATS Advantage: We offer a built-in, direct integration with popular data warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake. This allows you to automatically pipe all your raw, first-party event data directly into your own warehouse. This is crucial for advanced analysis, creating comprehensive customer profiles, and powering machine learning models, giving you full ownership and control over your most valuable asset: your data.

6. Simplified Setup with One-Click Integrations

   While server-side tracking is powerful, the initial setup can be intimidating. Manually configuring your website to send data to your server container can be a complex and time-consuming process, especially for popular platforms.

   The OATS Advantage: The OATS team has developed its own proprietary integrations for platforms like WordPress and Shopify. Instead of writing custom code or navigating complex APIs, you can install a simple plugin or app that handles the entire data layer and event sending process for you. This saves you countless hours of development time and eliminates a major barrier to adopting server-side tracking.

A Bespoke Solution, Not a One-Size-Fits-All Platform

Unlike other providers who offer a rigid, cookie-cutter setup, OATS understands that every business is unique. We provide a bespoke integration for every client at a low one-time cost of €299. If you opt for our yearly plan, this integration is completely free. This ensures your server-side tracking is not only set up correctly, but also optimized for your specific business needs and goals from day one.

While Google's GCP setup gives you the bare metal, OATS gives you the engine, the custom paint job, and the expert mechanics to get you on the road and ahead of the competition.