Google Analytics: How to overcome payload size restriction?

Question

I use Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce for some shops. On catalog page I have many products and I need to track their impressions. I do not track each product one-by-one, cause it will cause many requests, instead I add all of them through .ec:addImpression and then track entire pack by sending single pageview.

And everything was going well until I faced a problem, that on page with too many products requests to collect stopped working with no error. I've installed analytics debugger for Chrome and found out, that I've exceeded a payload limit, which is set to 8 KB (according to official documentation):

payload_data – The BODY of the post request. The body must include exactly 1 URI encoded payload and must be no longer than 8192 bytes.

And this is fine, but here's my question: is there any way to overcome this restriction? Maybe some option or method, that will allow not to bother about payload size and it will be automatically split into proper chunks? Or at least a method to get a payload in run-time to check its size. I run through documentation and found nothing.

Note: currently I manually track a "safe" number (which was discovered by experience) of products added by addImpression and then send them by non-interaction pageview hit. Of course, this solves my problem, by I want to know if there's a built-in solution.

Answer 1

Another possibility is to send only true impressions, that is, only for those products/items that the user is actually seeing above the fold. Not all products that you are sending impressions for are actually seen by the user until they scroll down the page below the fold. So this would require a modification to the implementation where you send your impression data as the user scrolls down the page and reveals more products. You can likely send more information with each product and still not exceed the payload, and you get a more accurate measure of your impressions.

Answer 2

Create a product data import that matches your product ids to product to product attributes (name, category, price etc). Wait until the data is processed, then change your tracking code so that only product ids are sent.

That should shrink down the request body enough to send all products, and the ids will be joined with the imported data when the incoming hits are processed.

Imported data is not applied retroactively, so it'S important that you do the data import first.

Answer 3

AFAIK there is no way to get your payload size from google analytics and it's a crying shame that analytics.js does not handle this issue automatically since the analytics.js library which constructs the payloads is best suited to handle this and thus minimise load on Google's servers...

I like Eike's solution, though if your products change a lot it might require automation. As @nyuen implies - sending only real impressions may help and is more accurate.

Another trick is to send the impression one at a time. (As shown or on page load) This will require the smallest change and reduce the payload to well bellow the limit.