Google has announced that Google Analytics now supports tracking on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). They’re pushing fast with AMP, trying to get all their ducks in a row for its debut at the end of the month.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, lead by Google and Twitter, is an open source initiative aimed at dramatically improving the performance of the mobile web.
Today’s users expect content that both loads super-fast and is easy to explore. Research shows web pages that take close to ten seconds to load can have up to a 58% bounce rate. That means it’s more important than ever to ensure websites optimize for performance, which is something the mobile web has suffered a lack of.
Just like any other HTML page, Accelerated Mobile Pages will load in any app web view or modern browser. According to the AMP Overview, the format works through a combination of a limited set of HTML technical functionality and cloud caching to deliver mobile content at a much higher level of performance than is the current norm.
To do this, AMP files prioritize speed through architectural and technical approaches. In addition, AMP files make content available to third parties, who then cache them in the cloud to reduce the time it takes to get to a user’s mobile device. Under this framework, platforms can cache content for optimal delivery speed while publishers remain in control.
Multiple technology companies, including Google Search, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have announced they’ll start publishing AMP pages in the coming months, and the new Analytics support gives the format even more momentum.
AMP and Google Analytics
Google remains committed to helping users measure their content, wherever it appears, and that commitment carries over to support for AMP. The aim of AMP support in Analytics is to make it easy for publishers to identify their best content and optimize user experience.
Analytics on AMP is handled by an open, reusable component developed by the Google Analytics in conjunction with the open source project. The <amp-analytics> component works with a global event listener that detects triggers, which can be configured to record page views, events, and even custom dimensions.
As a result, there’s no need to scatter custom JavaScript throughout your pages to detect event triggers and hits. You can simply define what actions trigger hits within the configuration and let the magic of AMP do the rest.
Before you get started with AMP Analytics, you’ll first need to get started with AMP itself. The AMP website has an introduction to getting started just for this purpose.
Once you’re up and running with AMP, it’s recommended you use a separate Google Analytics property to measure your AMP pages. As a new technology, some of the functionality you’re used to in analytics won’t be available. AMP pages can also appear in multiple contexts, including through different syndication caches, which means a single user that visits both an AMP and HTML version of a page can end up being treated as two distinct users. Using a separate Analytics property makes it easier to handle issues like these.
AMP was already a huge development for the mobile web, this is going to mean big things for analytics reporting. Now that you can track it with Analytics, it just got better.