Using AMP? A known bug is probably screwing up your Google Analytics

If you are using the Google-backed Accelerated Mobile Pages, there appears to be an excellent chance that those AMP pages are not being tracked correctly, if you use Google Analytics.

Christian Oliveira, a technical SEO consultant, posted a long, technical explanation of the issues AMP is giving with proper tracking in Google Analytics. Malte Ubi, Google’s technical lead for the AMP project, confirmed the problems and that they have no easy solution, in tweets today.

In summary, Oliveira found that:

• A unique visitor potentially can be reported as up to four different people, when accessing AMP pages.
• When a visitor navigates from an AMP page to a regular page in a site, that causes a new session to be generated, even though technically, it was the same session.
• Bounce rate will appear higher than normal when AMP pages are involved, because since new sessions are generated as described above, it appears as if visitors are leaving quickly when they are not.
• Pageviews per session will appear lower, when an AMP person moves from an AMP page to a regular page in a single session.
• Visitors who come to AMP page from search and then goes to another page will appear as if they are new visitors coming from referral traffic, rather than search.

Oliveira documents a solution to this, but it’s not for everyone nor perfect. Hopefully, Google will accelerated efforts on its end to come up with a solution, but that doesn’t look to be coming quickly, based on Ubi’s tweets.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.