How to Recover 11% of Your Analytics Data in 2 Minutes
Google offers an easy way to get 11% more signals in your analytics.
I just enabled it myself and it took me 2 minutes, most of which was spent looking for my Cloudflare password.
Google Tag Gateway (previously called First-party Mode with Cloudflare) ensures that instead of loading your Google Tag/GTM from Google's domain, it's loaded from your own domain.
Why does this simple change matter? Browsers and ad-blockers are aggressively blocking scripts from known third-party tracking domains, including Google's. When your tag is blocked, you lose that data. No pageview, no conversion, nothing.
With Google Tag Gateway you can recover at least some of the previously lost data, improve your attribution and audiences. Google claims that successful loads of your Google Tag will increase by 11%. By capturing more signals, you get more accurate conversion data and more reliable analytics metrics.
It's not as good as SGTM, but the fact that it's so easy to set up, makes it a no-brainer for many sites.
For the fully automated setup, the only requirement is that your website needs to use Cloudflare (free plan is enough).
With that the setup is dead simple - the quick animated video here shows the full setup.
For broader perspective including potential downsides, I recommend reading this older article from the god of web analytics, Simo Ahava. There is also a newer LinkedIn update with comments.
