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The Happy TaggerThe Happy Tagger
← Server-side tagging

Lesson 4 of 8

The Request Lifecycle

Server-side clicks into focus once you can trace a single event end to end. Here is the whole journey of one purchase.

1. PageGA4 tag→2. Your URL/g/collect→3. Clientparses→4. Tagsforward

What happens at each hop

  • Page: the client-side GA4 tag builds the hit and sends it to your tagging URL instead of google-analytics.com.
  • Your endpoint: the request hits your server container.
  • Client: the GA4 client recognizes the request and creates the event data object.
  • Tags: the server-side GA4 tag relays to Google; other tags (Meta CAPI, Google Ads) can fire off the same event.

The big shift: one request from the browser can fan out to many destinations from the server, and the browser never talks to those vendors directly.

Key takeaway

One hit leaves the page, lands on your endpoint, gets claimed by a client into an event data object, and is forwarded by one or more server-side tags. Learn to trace this in Preview and the model clicks.