First-party Mode: What Is It and How Do You Set It?

By Daniël 29 August 2025 2 min read

You’ve probably come across the term first-party a lot recently, especially when people talk about cookies and online tracking. But it’s not just about cookies; it’s also highly relevant when setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM) for your holiday park or travel business.

Here’s a quick guide to what First-party mode is, why it matters, and how it helps you prepare for the future of digital marketing.

Why First-party mode matters for holiday businesses

Google Tag Manager makes it easy to connect platforms such as Google Analytics and Google Ads, as well as other marketing tools, to your website. With GTM in place, you can see who has visited your site, understand guest behaviour, and show them the right offers, whether that’s a family break, a last-minute getaway, or a seasonal promotion.

The convenience of GTM is that it acts as a hub for all your tracking and marketing tags. But there’s a catch: all those tags load through googletagmanager.com. That means if a guest is using an Ad Blocker, your entire setup can be blocked in one go, cutting off valuable insights and remarketing opportunities.

From server-side tagging to First-party mode

To get around this, server-side tagging was developed. This approach lets you load all your marketing tags directly from your own domain, rather than from GTM itself. It’s effective at avoiding Ad Blockers, but the downside is that it’s quite technical and requires you to manage your own server setup.

That’s where First-party mode comes in. Google has introduced this as a simpler alternative: it allows you to load Google’s measurement and advertising technologies from your own domain, without the hassle of running a separate server.

Easy to set up, built for the future

With BEX CMS, enabling First-party mode takes just one tick in the settings. From there, everything runs through your own domain, making your tag setup more durable and future-proof. Google itself recommends this approach as the most sustainable way of managing tags in the years ahead.

“We recommend First-party mode for the most durable tag configuration.” – Google

So, if you want to make sure your holiday park website keeps reaching the right guests, even as browsers tighten restrictions and Ad Blockers become more common, First-party mode is the way forward.

👉 Check out our support article on First-party mode for step-by-step guidance, or watch the short video below to see how simple it really is.