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Publishers Reporting Huge Drop in AMP Traffic in Google Analytics

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[Updates at bottom]

If you are seeing a huge drop in AMP traffic on your sites, you are not alone.  Many publishers are seeing a similar drop across all of their properties.

The issue seems to have started around midnight for many publishers.  Working with a publisher with a large amount of AMP traffic, we tried to isolate the cause based on referral, device, OS, location and more, but couldn’t find any correlation (such as loss of all traffic from a particular device, OS, country etc) that would explain the huge drop.

Here is one example from a site owner showing AMP traffic drops comparing today with last Thursday (grey area marks the end of available reporting today).  You can see the loss of traffic.

Regular mobile traffic isn’t picking up the loss of AMP traffic however, as one would expect if there was an issue with AMP in the Google search results… that expected traffic is just missing.

Some are suspecting the issue might not be Google not sending the traffic but an issue with Google Analytics not tracking it properly.

One publisher posting in the Google Analytics help forum is seeing that AMP traffic shows up in live view for about 5 seconds before it is removed.

We can reproduce the issue somehow by accessing an AMP page: it shows in the Google Analytics live ticker but disappears within 5 seconds and does not seem to get counted, while other pages behave normally.

This sounds like perhaps Google changed something to combat referral spam being removed, but AMP pages are somehow caught in this.

It doesn’t seem to be an issue with the AMP plugin either, and the AMP plugin creator confirms they have not made any updates to the plugin in two weeks.

We haven’t done any changes in code. To be honest, we have not updated our plugin more than 2 weeks.

I guess this maybe an update in AMP-Analytics or Google Analytics or maybe other. I am not sure because I don’t have any proof.

The Google Analytics help forums has a publisher posting one solution, for those that are using the plugin.

I had the same issue…changed this one code in the plugin and it fixed it…
go to your amp/templates/single.php file
replace this code…
<?php do_action( ‘amp_post_template_head’, $this ); ?>
with this code…
<script async custom-element=”amp-ad” src=”https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-ad-0.1.js”></script>
        <script async custom-element=”amp-analytics” src=”https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js”></script>
one is for google anlytics and the other is for adsense
basically you want to make sure you’re not calling these multiple times.  check your source code and you might see these called multiple times in your header

However, the Analytics explanation doesn’t explain why there is still some traffic showing in Google Analytics from those pages.

Many publishers are still seeing their pages with AMP tags in the search results, so it doesn’t appear Google is dropping AMP pages (although there is a test without the AMP icon).

I have reached out to Google for more information on the issue and will update when I hear back.

Google has confirmed the Analytics issue and the teams are working on it.

And a fix is being rolled out:

H/T Paul Shapiro

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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