How many Product Variant I can push to Google Analytics? and how to do that using Tag manager?

Question

I'm trying to push multiple Product Variants to the DataLayer and Using the Tag Manager pushing these Variants to Google Analytics Premium.

I would like to know how many Product Variants i can add to the dataLayer, and what is the best way to push them to Google Analytics?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Limits

Short answer: You can push any number of product variants to the dataLayer, and you can send any number of variants to GA.

Long answer:

You main factor limiting the number of variants is the 8KB hit limit size. This effectively limits you to a few dozen products (or product variants) per hit, but you can get around this by sending multiple hits.

But, since GA also limits us to 500 hits per session, so technically the limit of product variants you can track in a session is somewhere between 10-20K.

There is also the table aggregation limit of 50K, which basically means any product variants below the top 50K will appear grouped in GA tables as 'Other'.

How to track

To track multiple products variants, push each to the datalayer (and then to GA) as a separate product, making sure product id/name and other product data common among variants stays consistent, altering only the 'variant' field (and any other instance-specific fields such as 'list', 'quantity', etc).

Here is a great guide for doing this for large numbers of products / product variants.

Answer 2

I've found that pushing the same product separately, it affects and causes the Quantity and Unique purchases to be the same. I would expect if I push the same product twice with a different variant, to be "Unique Purchase: 1" "Quantity: 2". but the result was, "Unique Purchase: 2" "Quantity: 2". So I just opted in combining the variants (ie. 'black, white') for the same product added because I cared more about the discrepancy of quantity.