Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is a service backed by Google that is designed to speed up your site’s load times on mobile devices. The service is quite good and has helped many individuals and companies improve their user experience. It appears, however, that there is a bug in the software, which is causing many AMP pages to have incorrect reporting with Google Analytics.
This was reported on by Christian Oliveira, who looked at the tech behind the service to show that there is a significant problem. Google has since confirmed the issue, but as yet does not have a way to fix it. You can read Oliveira’s full explanation of the issue HERE.
To sum up the issue, it was found that individual unique visitors to an AMP powered page can end up being counted as up to four different people. This obviously has the huge potential to skew reporting. Visitors that navigate from an AMP powered page to a regular page on the site will also generate a new session, which further bumps the numbers up even when they should have.
In the end, this bug can make it look like you’re getting far more visitors to your site than you actually are, but that you are getting fewer pages viewed per visitor. Since most marketers rely heavily on stats from Google Analytics in their decision making for their business, this is a potentially serious issue.
Even if there isn’t likely to be a solution from Google any time soon, knowing of the problem can help those using AMP to make better decisions for their sites.
