AMP – A Known Bug is Spoiling your Google Analytics Data
The concept of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) was introduced for increasing the user experience while browsing the websites on mobile devices. It helps by increasing page load speed, provides card views on Google, and cross-browser support for a seamless experience.
If you are using Accelerated Mobile Pages, you must be experiencing a few changes in your Google analytics data. The reason is that your AMP pages are not being tracked properly in Google analytics.
Christian Oliveira has explained the technical details of AMP issues in a blog post.
The Google’s technical lead for the AMP project Malte Ubi has also confirmed that this is a known issue and it doesn’t have a quick solution.
In summary, Christian found that:
- When accessing AMP pages, a unique visitor can be perceived as up to 4 different people
- When a visitor goes from an AMP page to a non-AMP page within the same website, it creates a new session. However, it should be counted as the same session
- Because of the reason above, the bounce rate will increase
Since a new session is generated, Google analytics will perceive the last session (which ended when the user navigated to a non-AMP page from an AMP page) with only one /a few page views.
- When an AMP person navigates from an AMP page to a non-AMP page in a single session, Pageviews per session will decrease
- Organic visitors who first lands on an AMP and then navigates to another page will be recorded as new visitors. The source of their visit to these pages will be counted under referral traffic instead of organic.
Christian has suggested a solution to these issues however it is not a perfect one nor applicable for all the use cases.
We hope that Google will soon come up with a solution to these issues however it doesn’t look to be coming quickly, based on Malte’s tweet.
