Leading The Industry with Tracking Code Improvements

Last year, Google Analytics launched asynchronous JavaScript tracking. This was a vast improvement over conventional JavaScript, since it reduced interference with other site scripting and allowed HTML pages to fully load even if the tracking code hasn’t yet loaded.

Today we’re announcing another ground-breaking web analytics feature: client side POST support. This new feature further improves the accuracy of Google Analytics, especially for sites with very long URLs and long event tracking parameters.

Traditionally, client-side tracking code beacons have been sent via HTTP GET requests, which are limited to 2048 bytes by some browsers and proxies. Requests sent to Analytics that exceeded this limit were dropped, and the data never reached Google Analytics. Starting with this release, requests longer than 2048 bytes will be sent via HTTP POST, which has no such limit. The tracking code will now support beacons up to 8192 bytes!

This feature requires no user configuration and has been pushed in the latest version of the JavaScript tracking code. With this new capability we hope to bring you even more innovative features in the coming months.

Posted by Brian Kuhn, Jim Wogulis, & Jonathan Owen, Tracking Code Team