Dive Brief:
- Google announced in a company blog post that, following customer feedback, it is enhancing Google Analytics AMP support to provide marketers with a more accurate understanding of how people are engaging with both AMP and non-AMP site pages.
- For marketers, the enhancement brings consistency to users across AMP and non-AMP pages served from their domain by unifying those users across the two different page formats.The change doesn't affect AMP pages served from the Google AMP Cache or any other AMP cache.
- In order to become unified on a website, a user must access both page formats. In practice, this means user and session counts will go down over time for marketers as Google Analytics recognizes the two user IDs are actually the same person, and new users might temporarily increase as IDs are reset. Other metric impacts include time on site, page views per session and bounce rate, which will rise consistent with sessions as AMP and non-AMP pageviews are no longer being treated as multiple sessions.
Dive Insight:
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open-source project designed to reduce load time and optimize mobile web pages, became part of mobile search results last February and has quickly seen traction with publishers. The format nominally competes with Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News for publisher content, but because of its open-source status grants more control over how pages are presented as well as over advertising on those pages. AMP also includes mobile web pages beyond publisher news content such as marketing landing pages and e-commerce pages.
The latest changes stay in line with Google giving more leeway than "walled garden," insular offerings like Facebook Instant articles in providing analytics on how people engage with both AMP and non-AMP webpages. If AMPs are shown to frequently perform better than non-AMP pages, it additionally demonstrates the product's value.
By last fall, Google was giving AMP higher priority in mobile search by adding AMP tags to organic search results and giving AMP results with breaking news and real-time alerts more prominence. A Teads report from last December found that AMPs delivered 15% higher completion rates, a 200% increase in click-through rate and an 18% lift in ad appearance.
The latest Google Analytics AMP enhancements will be complete across all accounts in the next few weeks, per the blog post.
