Are you using Google backed Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? If so, this could be important for you. It appears that there is an excellent chance that those AMP pages aren’t being tracked correctly, if you’re using 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. Google’s technical lead for the AMP project Malte Ubi, confirmed the issues 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.
According to Oliveira, there is a solution to this, but it isn’t perfect, or for everybody. Lets hope that Google will accelerate their efforts on its end to come up with a solution, but that doesn’t look to be coming quickly, based on Ubi’s tweets.