By the Mayab Media Team
Did you move your tracking to a server container so Google would stop seeing your visitors' IP addresses? That arrangement now has an expiry date. January 11, 2027.
On November 2, Google Ads freelancer Adriaan Dekker shared an email Google sent to server-side Tag Manager users, and PPC Land wrote it up the same day. Server containers will stop treating IP redaction as one switch for everything. Each tag gets its own handling instead. And Google's advertising tags (Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360 and Campaign Manager 360, Floodlight included) will receive the full visitor IP by default.
Google Analytics tags keep redacting. Meta, TikTok and other third-party tags keep whatever controls they already have.
One caveat first. As of November 2, PPC Land couldn't find a public Google announcement, or the opt-out help article the email refers to. So treat this as what Google told customers by email, not published documentation.
Who this actually hits
Fewer businesses than you'd think.
Most small and mid-size sites run Tag Manager in the browser only. If that's you, nothing changes. A browser tag talks to Google directly, so Google already sees the IP on that request. (That's exactly why privacy-minded companies paid for server-side setups in the first place.)
You're in scope if your account has a server container, usually paired with a tracking subdomain like metrics.yourdomain.com, and that container fires Google Ads conversion tags or Floodlight. Not sure? Open Tag Manager and look at your containers. A server container is labeled as one.
The default is what bothers us
Google pitches the change as better measurement, better personalization and stronger campaign results. The email also mentions privacy-enhancing technologies and invalid traffic filtering. It names none of them and shares no numbers.
We believe part of it. A full IP really does help with spam filtering and conversion matching, and PPC Land notes Google has widened how it uses IP addresses across several products this year. If your conversions are under-counted, you may see a lift.
What we don't like is the direction of the switch.
When Google gave AdSense publishers a full-IP sharing control on June 1, 2026, it shipped turned off. This one ships turned on. Containers that nobody touches will start sending full IPs on January 11. And plenty of companies built a server container precisely to hold that data back. If your privacy policy or a client contract promises IP redaction before data reaches ad platforms, that promise could quietly stop being true in about ten weeks.
Consent rules don't change either. The email says advertisers need proper notices and legally required consent in place, and points to Google's EU user consent policy for EEA traffic. Moving tags to a server moves the processing. The permission question stays exactly where it was.
What to do before January 11
Start by deciding what you want. That's a business decision first. The tech part is the easy bit.
If you sell to consumers under strict privacy rules, or your legal team signed off on redaction, keep redacting. If you're a B2B company with thin conversion data and your counsel is comfortable, sending the full IP might be a reasonable trade.
Then work through these:
- Confirm whether you have a server container and which Google ad tags fire inside it.
- Search your privacy policy for anything it says about IP addresses. Send it to whoever owns legal.
- To keep redaction, read Google's help page on IP address redaction for server-side tagging. It describes a Transformation: a variable that calls getAnonymizedIpAddress(), then an "Augment event" transformation that overrides the ip_override field for the tags you choose under Affected Tags. Test it in Preview before publishing.
- Whether that's the same thing Google's email means by "opt out" is unconfirmed. Watch for the promised help article and check again in December.
- Set a reminder for the week of January 11 to look at your conversion counts.
That last one matters more than it looks.
Say you spend $5,000 a month on Google Ads and report 100 leads at $50 each. If better matching records 10% more conversions, you'll see 110 leads and a cost per lead of about $45. Same phone calls, same form fills. Nice chart. It would be the wrong reason to raise your budget.
Our take
We'd prefer this were opt-in. Still, calling it a scandal would be a stretch. Google gave roughly ten weeks of notice, and redaction appears fixable with one transformation most setups can add in an afternoon.
The real risk is the company that set up server tagging two years ago, forgot how it works, and never opens the email.
Decide on purpose, write it down, and make sure your container does what your privacy policy says it does.
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