I have never used Cloudflare. The new product from Google Ads, the Google tag gateway, requires a Cloudflare account. If using Cloudflare just for this purpose, will the free account suffice, or do we need a paid plan that matches the site’s traffic? Using Google tag gateway requires DNS edits, changing to cloudflare name servers.
At launch, the service has Cloudflare integration with automatic setup out of the box.
But, in principle, and provided you’re willing and able to do the work, you can set this up with anything that can proxy the 3rd-party domain to a path on your own domain (CDN, load balancer, some custom proxy setup, etc).
The Google Tag Gateway is available at all Cloudflare plan levels, including free.
And all Cloudflare CDN plans (including free) have no traffic/bandwidth limit, provided the traffic being proxied does not violate Cloudflare CDN’s ToS.
The domain has to be proxied at the gateway provider’s end (Cloudflare in this case) before the URL can be rewritten and additional magic performed. So, yes, you’ll with a Cloudflare free plan, you need to add the domain to Cloudflare, change the nameservers, and proxy the traffic.
Thank you for the detailed response. I am now understanding this is an existing product that Google has connected with. Google Ads just launched an integration that connects with Cloudflare to make it easier to set up for non-Cloudflare users like me.
Thank you for addressing my main concern, which is the bandwidth limit. Will you please expand on the rules and redirect limits of the Free account? I want to make sure there is no scenario where a connection will be refused because a site has hit its limit.
I do have an enterprise client that already has a custom DNS setup for security and other reasons. I’m not sure it would make sense for them to switch just for this. Can this free service integrate with a 3rd-party in just for tag gateway, while the existing service does the heavy lifting? Thanks for your time.
no, these are all ecommerce sites. most are using youtube embeds, with maybe a few small hosted files. thank you for sharing the article. I will check it out.
