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I have a NextJS site which is statically generated at build (SSG).

There are two things I need to implement next

  1. Google Analytics
  2. GDPR compliant opt-in cookie options

The first one is easy enough to do, however i'm struggling with making this GDPR compliant. The issue is I don't have access to cookies at server side when my site is statically generated. This means that without knowing whether the user has consented to cookies at the server, I can't serve (or not serve) the analytics script along with the rest of the page.

Possible solutions:

  1. Handle everything at client side - ask for consent, then dynamically add the GA tag to the <head>. However i'm worried this will negatively effect the analytics, or break it altogether. Does anyone know?

  2. Change my site to be server-side rendered (SSR). I'd love to avoid this if possible. I'm really happy with how fast the site is running with SSG. It's essentially just a basic blog so would be a shame to have to convert for the sake of analytics.

  3. Any other ideas?...

If anyone has experience with this, whether they used Next or Nuxt, etc, your input would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance

juliomalves
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bjurtown
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1 Answers1

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Use Google Tag Manager to manage everything, your GA integration and your cookie integration using something like CookieHub for example (How to set up Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager for Next-Js?)

GTM will allow you to trigger the GA script only if the user specified he accepts analytics cookies.

Eitherway you could use Vercel.com built in analytics since your website is using Next.js wich is Vercel's framework.

Exodraft
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    Thank you. I ended up going with a different cookie package (https://github.com/maticzav/nookies) but handled the analytics through GTM and custom triggers just like you said. Works a charm. As for built-in analytics, i'm deploying with Netlify, and they do have a service. Looking into it, seems like it could be valuable to have both GA and Netlify's service running. Especially as Netlify analytics will run at the server at no performance cost to user. – bjurtown Feb 09 '21 at 19:59
  • When you mention "GTM will allow you to trigger the GA script only if the user specified he accepts analytics cookies.", can you give a quick explanation of how this is achieved? I'm trying to use react-cookie-consent to either add the script or not based on the cookie value, but that might bring other problems, so what you say sounds like the right way. – Ben Balderas Nov 22 '21 at 16:36