AMP & Google Analytics: How to Track Accelerated Mobile Pages Traffic

Looking to get more accurate data about the visitors coming from Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to your WordPress website? MonsterInsights is the only Analytics WordPress plugin that lets you integrate with Google AMP that also supports Google Optimize.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to add Google Analytics to AMP Pages on WordPress using MonsterInsights.

What Is Google AMP?

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Project (AMP) is an opensource initiative with the goal of making web content load faster for mobile users.

You might’ve already seen the AMP symbol beneath some Google search results on mobile.

It tells you that, by clicking on that particular search result, you’ll be directed to an AMP page, which is a streamlined version of the original article specifically built for boosting page speed.

Best of all, if you click on the search results found in the News carousel, you can easily swipe through different pages in the carousel, which load almost instantly on your mobile browser.

AMP pages are a stripped-down version of your site. They use a separate streamlined version of CSS and lazy load images to make your web pages load faster.

Take a look at the difference between a normal mobile web page and an AMP-enabled page:

Enabling AMP in your articles is a win-win for you and your organic visitors because it increases the pageviews for you and improves the reading experience for your site visitors. Plus, it helps to improve your site’s SEO rankings.

Tracking AMP-enabled Pages with Google Analytics

You can track your AMP-enabled pages with Google Analytics, but it’s quite a complex task for beginners. That is because AMP uses a separate analytics snippet than your standard Google Analytics tracking code.

You’d have to actually modify the Google Analytics tracking code manually. Even then, sometimes it still requires additional troubleshooting to get it to work right.

But thankfully, there’s the MonsterInsights plugin to help you easily add Google Analytics to AMP pages with just a couple of clicks.

MonsterInsights is the only Analytics WordPress plugin that supports AMP integration with Google Optimize, which is a free A/B testing and personalization product by Google.

That means, not only you can better understand your website visitors, but you can also deliver more engaging experiences that are relevant to your audience.

A few key features of the MonsterInsights Google AMP addon are:

• It stops double tracking visitors: By default, when a user visits an AMP page and then a normal page (or vice versa), Google AMP Analytics counts it as 2 different sessions. Our Google AMP addon fixes this issue and tracks it as a single session.
• It supports other MonsterInsights features: In your AMP pages, you can adjust sample rates with the Performance addon or segment your Analytics with different dimensions with the Custom Dimensions addon.
• A/B test your AMP pages with Google Optimize: You can create different versions of your AMP pages to test user interactions so you can discover what works best on your AMP pages.

Adding Google Analytics to AMP Pages in 2 Minutes

We’re assuming that you’ve already set up Google Analytics in WordPress using MonsterInsights.

To integrate Google AMP with Google Analytics, you’ll need to install and activate the Google AMP addon.

To access the addon, you must have the Plus license plan or higher.

You’ll also need to have the Automattic AMP plugin installed and activated, and you must be running WordPress version 4.6 or newer.

Once all that is taken care of, go to Insights » Addons and click Install under the MonsterInsights Google AMP addon.

After the plugin is installed, the button will change to say Activate. Go ahead and click the Activate button to make sure the addon is active and ready to use.

Congrats!

You’ve successfully installed the Google AMP addon. No further configuration is required.

If you want to confirm your AMP settings just to be sure, go to Insights » Settings and click the Publishers tab. Then, scroll down to ‘Google AMP’ section. You’ll see the cursor for Google AMP activation is enabled.

The second option there allows you to enable AMP tracking after consent. If you haven’t implemented a consent box on your site, make sure not to enable this option. Otherwise, it will prevent the plugin from tracking all AMP users.

How to Find AMP Data in Google Analytics

To find your AMP data in Google Analytics, log into your Google Analytics account and select the website which you’d like to find the AMP data for.

Go to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages. To view the data for your AMP pages only, use the search bar above the table with the keyword /amp. This will show you the traffic reports for your AMP pages only.

If you’re monetizing your website with Google Analytics, you might also want to track the performance of your ads. You can refer to our guide to learn how to track Google AdSense in Google Analytics.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more Google Analytics tutorials.