Another Step from Google in the Battle Against Ad Blockers
Google has announced the First Party Mode in its Beta version. This update assumes you’re already using some functionality for traffic routing (CDN, Cloudflare, Load Balancer). With it, you can redirect Google requests not to google-analytics com, but to your own endpoint – for example, www yoursite com/tagging/.
The solution is interesting and quite understandable. However, questions remain. For example:
1. How will this mechanic work with server-side container tracking?
2. We already had the ability to configure a custom "same origin" endpoint within server-side GTM. Is the new option more logical or simpler?
Furthermore, as Simo Ahava rightly pointed out, the race against ad blockers is a double-edged sword. If you receive significant traffic volumes and start using your own endpoint instead of the corresponding third-party ones, you face the non-zero risk of ending up on these very blockers' blacklists. And nobody wants that.
If you work with GA4 to BigQuery exports, be sure to check out my SQL cheat sheet.