Below is a report showing weekly traffic to twooctobers.com coming from AI services.
The screenshot is from a GA4 Exploration I created to monitor AI traffic. I love the regular expression shared by Larry Engel in his excellent post, How to see AI referral traffic in GA4.
I was also caught by surprise by MeasureSummit this month. It was on my radar, but it’s a free and virtual conference, which led me to put it in the “that sounds cool, I’ll have to check it out” space in my brain. In other words, I didn’t set aside nearly enough time to watch all of the amazing content. I’m literally paying for my mistake, because I ended up buying an all-access pass for $300 so I could (re)watch sessions at my leisure. I strongly recommend signing up for next year if you are into the nuts and bolts of marketing analytics.
The GA4 product team has been busy this month – here are a few highlights:
Google announced First-party mode for Google Tags and Google Tag Manager several months ago. I didn’t pay it much attention because
This month, they announced that you can nowdeploy the Google tag in First-party mode through Cloudflare, so I thought maybe I should dedicate a little bit of time to understand it better.
I’ve started using Google’s AI-powered research tool, NotebookLM, to help me learn new things, so I created a notebook dedicated to First-party Mode. I gave my notebook the following links to digest:
I was then able to ask it specific questions like:
Is first-party mode just for the google tag or can I use it for Google Tag Manager and other third-party tags?
The answer was very detailed, and included citations. The short version is that it can be used for Tag Manager and other third-party tags.
What’s the difference between first-party mode and server-side Tag Manager (sGTM)?
I got an even-more detailed response to this one. The short version is that they have some similar benefits regarding first- versus third-party cookies, but first-party mode isn’t server-side, so there aren’t as many performance benefits as sGTM and you don’t have the same level of control over what data is getting sent to whom.
After reading those and listening to the dorky-but-informative audio overview NotebookLM produced for me, my takeaway is that sGTM is more work to set up, but is a much better option in the long run. I also got a good reminder that new technologies may help us circumvent ad-blockers and third-party cookie limitations, but we can run afoul of privacy regulations while doing so, and we should respect, not circumvent the wishes of our website visitors.
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Nico loves marketing analytics, running, and analytics about running. He's Two Octobers' Head of Analytics, and loves teaching. Learn more about Nico or read more blogs he has written.
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