With more people adopting AMP on their sites for speeding up mobile pages, measurement has begun to lag. This is quickly changing though.
When a visitor who came to an MP-enabled page, and then a non-AMP page of a site was counted as two separate people, according to Google Analytics. Back in May, Google fixed the double-counting issue for visitors to publisher domain pages, and although that was a good thing, visitors to AMP Cache pages have still been counted separately in Analytics. Google made an announcement on Tuesday that there was a fix for AMP pages served via Google AMP Cache, including from Google search results.
The new AMP Client ID API, coupled with Google Analytics, allows pages taht are partially served on Google platforms like search and partially on site owner domains to communicate with each other. According to the blog post, Google Analytics “can understand if a user on your non-AMP pages had ever visited an AMP page displayed by Google. When true, Google Analytics can help you understand user behavior across these two page types as a single cohesive experience.”
All users will have to do is opt in to the new solution, and utilize a small bit of code on both AMP and non-AMP websites to enable it. Instructions for setting up the Google AMP Client ID API are here.
With this fix, site owners will probably see user and session metrics drop, and new user counts may rise after enabling the API as visitors are consolidated and counted more accurately. This effect will continue until all past visitors to AMP pages return to the site.