What Is Payload Inspection?

Payload inspection is the practice of examining the actual data a tag transmits, not just confirming that the tag is present and firing. A tag can appear to be working correctly while its payload silently contains personal data it was never meant to send, which presence-only monitoring will never catch.

Most basic tag audits stop at ‘did this tag fire?’ Payload inspection asks the harder question: what exactly did it send? A tag can fire exactly as configured and still leak PII: the Query Parameters in a URL, a hashed email in a form event, a customer ID embedded in an event name. Catching that requires actually reading the transmitted data, not just confirming a network request happened.