We are in the process of setting up Snowplow on our website and I am trying to figure out how we can get our events we have setup in GTM (client side, not server side) into Snowplow?
- We are not setting up snowplow through GTM since it’s not server side
- We are setting up snowplow tracker directly on our site manually
- We have data in our data layer, events firing in GTM that go to UA & GA4
How can we utilize the existing events in GTM client side that go to UA & GA4 to go into Snowplow?
We want to be mindful of not being impacted by ad blockers & gdpr restrictions with using GTM client side?
Welcome aboard Rich.
If you’re using GTM that would be where you would usually implement any tracking. That way you can fire the Snowplow events along with the GA events and has access to your existing data layer. That said, you can implement the initial script include and initialization inside your application and then use GTM to fire the events, if that’s how you want to do it.
There is documentation on sending Google Analytics events into a Snowplow pipeline: Google Analytics Plugin | Snowplow Documentation
Simo Ahava also has an extensive blog post about it, though it may be a little out of date: Snowplow: Full Setup With Google Analytics Tracking | Simo Ahava's blog
Ad blockers: Some ad blockers will block GTM completely, which means anything relying on that won’t fire. If you implement Snowplow inside your application and send at least one event directly from your application, then implement the GA beacon to be copied to your Snowplow collector, you’ll at least be able to measure the extent to which this blocking is happening.
GDPR: well that’s something for you to work through but the data collected by Snowplow will be under your control so you can decide where it lives and what restrictions are placed on it.