Enhanced Analytics Support for AMP from Google
Google is rolling out improvement to its Analytics offering that should provide developers a better understanding of how consumers are engaging with their business across accelerated mobile pages (AMP) and non-accelerated mobile pages of their website.
Adoption of AMP has increased dramatically over the past year, with billions of these pages now filling the Web. The problem is that it has been challenging for developers to get a clear understanding of activity because consumers are often identified inconsistently across accelerated mobile pages and non-accelerated mobile pages within Google Analytics.
Fortunately, Google will now be unifying users across the two page formats. Google did warn that once the roll out is complete (in the next few weeks presumably), developers may see coinages in user and session counts, including changes to related metrics. Google wrote in its official announcement on the merge that:
User and session counts will go down over time as we recognize that two formerly distinct IDs are in fact the same user; however, at the time this change commences, the metric New Users may rise temporarily as IDs are reset.
In addition, metrics like time on site, page views per session, and bounce rate will rise consistent with sessions with AMP and non-AMP pageviews no longer being treated as multiple sessions. This is a one-time effect that will continue until all your users who have viewed AMP pages in the past are unified (this can take a short or long period of time depending on how quickly your users return to your site/app).
Keep in mind that this only applies to accelerated mobile pages on the domain where the content is originally hosted, so those concerned with the integrity of data within AMP caches or in platform experiences will have to wait.
