Technological advancements are creating new foundations for digital advertising, with privacy at the core. Connecting ad clicks and conversions can break with the evolving digital landscape – leaving marketers with incomplete attribution and less confidence in campaign performance.
To help address this shift, we’re introducing Fastly Ad Tag Gateway, built in collaboration with Google, to support the Google tag gateway for advertisers. Together, we’re enabling advertisers to serve tags from their own domains. This restores measurement visibility and can lead to an 14% uplift in observed signals* for advertisers who configure the Google tag gateway.
This collaboration builds on Fastly’s long history of working with Google across performance, security, and privacy-enhancing technologies.
The Measurement Gap
New protections are critical for user privacy, but they disrupt businesses' ability to flourish
When signals are lost:
ROI becomes harder to measure
The value exchange of the open web is weakened
Campaign optimization slows, and reporting gaps undermine confidence
Compliance pressures increase
Without a first-party tagging strategy, advertisers face a loss of data strength, risking diminished visibility into ad conversions and impacting potential revenue.
Target Audience
Addressing the measurement gap requires a unified strategy that empowers marketing to optimize and enables engineering to maintain control. The Fastly Ad Tag Gateway is built for the key teams responsible for both campaign success and underlying infrastructure.
Marketers
Web Admins & Platform Engineers
Must be a Fastly CDN customer and require a configuration of Google Ads.
How Fastly Ad Tag Gateway Works
Fastly Ad Tag Gateway enables advertisers to route Google tag traffic through their own domains using Fastly’s edge platform.
Instead of loading tags in a third-party context, requests are served from a customer-controlled path (for example, yourdomain.com/metrics). Fastly then securely forwards those requests to Google’s measurement endpoint via smart proxy routing. This creates a more direct and transparent data flow. Because traffic originates from the advertiser’s domain, it operates in a first-party context, improving signal resilience. This represents a forward-thinking architectural approach, using privacy-enhancing principles to build a more durable foundation for measurement.
Key Capabilities
First-party routing at the edge: Define a path (such as /a1b2c3) that Fastly routes to Google’s endpoints while preserving domain ownership and browser compliance expectations.
Secure authorization and onboarding: Marketers initiate setup through the Google interface, and then Fastly handles backend configuration using secure OAuth flows, verifying domain access, and automatically establishing routing.
Granular configuration control: Web admins can control subdomains, injection rules, and routing paths. Validation endpoints allow teams to confirm configuration before product activation.
First-Party Data, Private by Design
Upgrading tags to run from your own domain gives you stronger ownership of your tagging infrastructure. While the technology is new, the underlying principles of user transparency and control remain constant. This approach helps you meet your compliance goals without sacrificing visibility into ad conversions.
By using privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), you can balance measurement needs with user privacy, strengthening your privacy posture while maintaining the performance data you need to evaluate campaigns effectively. Organizations can strengthen their privacy posture and maintain the performance data they need to evaluate campaigns effectively. And stronger privacy doesn’t have to mean weaker performance.
Built for What’s Next
Our collaboration with Google is an important step in helping advertisers adapt to a privacy-first internet.
It also creates a scalable foundation for broader adtech integrations in the future, expanding measurement capabilities while maintaining a strong privacy stance. First-party architectures will play a critical role in restoring visibility, strengthening compliance, and unlocking sustainable digital advertising performance.
To learn more about Google Tag Gateway routing with Fastly Ad Tag Gateway, check out our documentation on how to get started.
* Google Data, Global, Performance, Apr 09, 2025 - Apr 16, 2025 7d trailing median [Uplift is based on Google tag script loads comparing tags not operating Google tag gateway versus tags operating in Google tag gateway]