Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are an excellent way to drive traffic to your website, as users searching around on their smartphones do not want to spend time waiting for a full site to load. As we have previously discussed on this blog, Google is now heavily focusing on using AMP for search results and rankings.
However, there is a chance that your AMP pages are not being tracked properly in Google Analytics, and could actually be messing with your Analytics numbers. A prominent SEO consultant posted an explanation this past January detailing the core problems Google Analytics is having with respect to AMP.
These major issues include the following:
- A visitor potentially being reported as four unique visitors while on an AMP page.
- New sessions being generated when visitors moves from an AMP page to a regular page.
- The bounce rate appearing higher than normal with AMP pages, as those new sessions created make it seem as if visitors are leaving quickly when they are not.
- Page views per session appearing lower as a visitor moves from an AMP page to a regular page during a single session.
- Visitors who jump from an AMP page from their searches to another page will be counted as new visitors from referral traffic, not search.
Malte Ubi, who is the technical lead for the AMP project over at Google, confirmed these issues exist in a series of tweets on March 2nd, acknowledging that there is no simple process to fix what is currently happening. Until Google is able to come up with a solution, the relationship between Google Analytics and Accelerated Mobile Pages will continue to be wonky.