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Why is the GA4 Measurement Protocol Tag redirecting events to a different endpoint?
“Hey there! I’ve been playing around with GA4’s Measurement Protocol to send event data to this GTM Server-Side thing and then onto GA4 again. Usually, everything goes as planned, but this time something odd’s happened. Check this out:
When I give GTMS Client a certain event, it looks like this:
`
{
“client_id”:”ND+VxzSadb1BmLKxlzHZiLidLj6X6kyM2mTNewDRSIc=.1675251033″… //And so on
}
`And I’d expect GA4 to pass this onto this URL right here: http://www.google-analytics.com/mp/collect. But nope, what it’s doing is sending it to this place instead:
`
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?cid=ZjceIJMKEZPkhLBLd1%2BzF0ekLIINdDre%2FJO1UF0RvMM%3D.1675344158… //And so on
`Now, isn’t that weird? You’d think the body of this request would contain the same old JSON I sent to GTM in the first place, but that’s not the case. It could only be me, but I reckon this is why GA4 is misunderstanding the session_id and creating all sorts of problems. So, is this how it’s supposed to work, or am I missing something here?”
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2 Replies
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It looks like there may be some confusion over how Google Analytics 4 (GA4) operates with the Google Tag Manager Server (GTMS). When you pass an event to GTMS, it typically sends it to GA4 via the Measurement Protocol endpoint (www.google-analytics.com/mp/collect). However, GA4 can also send this data to the gtag.js endpoint (www.google-analytics.com/g/collect) as part of its normal operation. What’s important here is payload of the request. If there’s a mismatch or if some required parameters, like session_id, are missing or differently formatted, GA4 might not interpret the data correctly. It would be a good idea to closely examine the structure and content of your initial event and compare it with what’s actually being sent to GA4. This will help you understand if there is any discrepancy causing GA4 to misunderstand the session_id. If this doesn’t solve the problem, you might need to consult GA4 documentation or seek help from the Google’s support community.
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It sounds like you’re facing an issue related to interpreting the JSON data and the redirection of data between GTM Server-Side and GA4. Please note some nuances about the Measurement Protocol: it uses the POST method to collect data, thus sending information within the body of the request. However, in your case, it seems like data is not being passed within a POST request body but is rather seen as a URL parameter in a GET request.
Regarding the redirection to ‘https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect’ instead of ‘www.google-analytics.com/mp/collect’, it seems there is a misconfiguration since it should be going to ‘/mp/collect’, which is the endpoint for the Measurement Protocol.
The issue could be rooted in an error in your GTM Server configuration or a mistake in the Measurement Protocol parameters. I would suggest checking your server-side tagging setup in GTM to ensure that it’s set to handle POST requests and validate your Measurement Protocol parameters.
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