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Google service account for SST

Feature availability

This feature is available to all customers (including the free Starter plan)

When you use Usercentrics Server-Side Tracking in combination with Server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) hosting, Google service accounts allow you to connect your server-side container with powerful services offered by the Google Cloud Platform like BigQuery and Firestore. This lets you store, query, and enrich data as part of your server-side setup.

Common use cases

  • Data storage:

    • Store incoming event and conversion data to a BigQuery data warehouse to enable advanced reporting and analytics

    • Store key attributes in Firestore (like identifiers and consent information), to use them during event processing for subsequent requests

  • Data retrieval and enrichment:

    • Retrieve consented data about users from Firestore to enhance conversion events

    • Get customer data from Firestore and use it for conditional tag firing, audience segmentation, and real-time website personalization without exposing data

    • Pull product profit data from Firestore or Google Sheets, and use it for conversion value to optimize your bidding based on margins, without exposing this data client-side

How to use a Google service account with Usercentrics Server-Side Tracking:

You will need to do two things:

  1. Create a service account credentials file with permissions to the services you want to use

  2. Upload the file to your container

The following sections describe these steps.

Creating a service account credentials file

  1. Create or log in to the Google Cloud Platform console.

  2. Select IAM & Admin

  3. Select Service Accounts and then Create Service Account

  4. Give the service account a Name and click Create and Continue

  5. Add permissions for the services you want to connect to. For example, if you’re connecting to Firestore, add the Cloud Datastore User role. If using BigQuery, then add the BigQuery Data Editor role. Then click Done.

  6. After creating it, click on it in the list view to access the service account’s details page. Select Keys and then Create new key under the Add key menu.

  7. Select JSON and then Create. This will automatically download a file to your computer. You will need this in the next step.

Uploading a service account credentials file to your sGTM container

After creating the service account credentials file, go to Usercentrics Server-Side Tracking and select the sGTM container that you want to connect with these resources. Then:

  1. Click on the Features tab. In the Google Service Account card click Use.

  2. Select the file you just created, drop it into the upload box and click Save changes.

  3. The service will confirm the service account was created successfully and restart your container to make use of these credentials.

Next steps

You can now connect to connect to the resources you selected in your GCP project. A great way to do this is through the built-in tags in sGTM or the ones provided by the Google sGTM Pantheon project.