Managing consent in the sGTM container (Server-Side)

When you're using server-side tracking, you also need to configure consent inside your Server-Side GTM (sGTM) container. Below, we’ll walk you through how to set this up, step by step.

When Consent Mode is enabled in your web GTM container, Google tags automatically add a GCS parameter (Google Consent State) to each outgoing request.

Example of a GA4 request sent from the browser to your server container:

https://sgtm.example.com/g/collect?v=2&tid=G-XXXXXX&gtm=45je37&_p=123456&gcs=G100

The part gcs=G100 contains the user’s current consent settings.

How the GCS value works

• G1 → version of the consent string

• Characters after that (e.g. 00) → actual consent values:

  • 1 = granted

  • 0 = denied

So when GCS = G101, it basically means 'ad_storage' is denied and 'analytics_storage' is allowed.

💡 Google tags in your server container automatically read the GCS parameter and respect the user's consent. You don't need to configure anything extra for them. This applies to all native Google tags such as GA4, Google Ads, and Floodlight.

You can use custom triggers that look for specific GCS patterns to control when a tag is allowed to fire.

Trigger name: analytics_storage = denied

Trigger type: Custom

This trigger fires on:

• Client Name equals GA4

• ED | x-ga-gcs ends with 0

💡 ED | x-ga-gcs’’ is a event data variable which takes the GCS variable from the incoming request

Trigger name: ad_storage = denied

Trigger type: Custom

This trigger fires on:

• Client Name equals GA4

• ED | x-ga-gcs starts with G10

💡 Here, G10 indicates ad_storage consent is denied.

Once your triggers are created, it’s time to apply them to the tags that shouldn’t fire without consent.

1. Open the tag that should not fire when consent is denied.

2. Go to Triggering → Exceptions.

3. Add the appropriate blocking triggers:

   • analytics_storage = denied

   • ad_storage = denied

This makes sure the tag stays blocked whenever a visitor has denied consent for those storage types.