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A clear-eyed look at what works in cookieless tracking, what does not, and where sGTM fits. Includes the trade-offs we hit along the way.
The phrase "cookieless tracking" has been used to mean enough different things that it is now mostly a marketing word. Worth unpacking. Below are the questions we hear most often, with the answers we give in real conversations.
Below roughly 50,000 monthly events, the answer is "probably not, unless you have a specific reason." Compliance pressure or a brand that depends on one or two large advertising partners can flip that calculation quickly.
Modestly. The wins on Core Web Vitals are real but not dramatic. The bigger improvement is in data quality, not in milliseconds.
Yes, almost always. The client-side container is what captures the events. The server-side container is where you decide what to do with them.
It works well together, provided you propagate the consent state to your server container as part of the request payload. We have a separate post on that.
Both are exactly the kind of workload sGTM was built for. Send them server-side and you will see a meaningful lift in matched conversions.
On SprTags, plans start at $5 a month. If you self-host on GCP, expect more, mostly because someone on your team will be paid to keep it healthy.
Be sceptical of any tool that claims to track without cookies and without consent. The honest ones use a more careful version of the same building blocks.