Some big updates in the Google ecosystem that will save a lot of manual work.

1. New Built-in GTM Variables

Google Tag Manager rarely adds new built-in variables, but they just dropped three significant ones:

• Analytics Client ID
• Analytics Session ID
• Analytics Session Number

By reading directly from GA cookies, these retire custom JavaScript workarounds, offering a cleaner, synchronous solution significantly more reliable than querying the gtag() API.

2. New “Analytics Storage” Variable

They also added a new variable type that gives granular control over these identifiers, allowing you to customise Measurement IDs and cookie prefixes easily.

3. Google Tag Gateway via GCP (Beta)

The biggest news: you can now route Google tag traffic through your own first-party domain using Google Cloud’s load balancer.

• It is a one-click setup directly in GTM.
• It removes the dependency on Cloudflare for automated setups.

This is a huge step forward for first-party data and simplified server-side workflows.