Drastic Bounce Rate Plunge AMP Linker Unification

Table of Contents

• Understanding Google Analytics AMP Linker & Session Unification
• AMP Analytics Journey Across Two Sessions
• Session 1
• Session 2
  • AMP Analytics Correct Setup
    • This post is about the unification of these two sessions a visitors journey from, the AMP Cache CDN URL and the Real URL
  • Connecting tag to the Site
  • Testing the GTM Tags
  • AMP Analytics Limitation

Understanding Google Analytics AMP Linker & Session Unification

AMP Site showing higher bounce rates?

Then you should follow this post closely it’s a short How-To on Unification of Amp sessions on Analytics Data, Correctly Doing AMP Analytics Session Unification with your domain and testing that the analytics tag is set up correctly with a testing tool in the last step of this post.

AMP Analytics Journey Across Two Sessions

When a visitor with a google search lands at your site on his mobile device particularly, he is on the AMP CDN domain, the sparking sign is not your real domain, for example in the screencast below, a visitor opens a link from google search index he visits amp cache URL that is hosted by google.

Add name, select your country

Select AMP as a Container, Amp Container has a specific features for Amp if compared to the usual GTM Conatiner

Once Container is created you can create a New Tag, Specifically for Conversion Linker on AMP Analytics

Add Conversion Linker, to your Tags its a Featured Tag as in the Screencast above.

Add your domain name check enable linking across domains.

Add Triggering, Firing triggers to All Pages, Page View

Save and Submit, Click On Publish

You can give any version name to your container and description to remember changes made to this container.

Connecting tag to the Site

If you use WordPress, Edit your header.php file

This goes in your Head Tags :

<!-- AMP Analytics -->
<script async custom-element="amp-analytics" src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js"></script>
<!-- Google Tag Manager -->
<amp-analytics type="gtag" data-credentials="include">
<script type="application/json">
{
  "vars": {
    "gtag_id": "UA-1234567-3",
    "linker": {
      "domains": ["yourdomain.com"]
    }
    ,
    "config": {
      "UA-1234567-3": {
        "groups": "default"
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>
</amp-analytics>
<!-- AMP Analytics -->

This goes in your Body Tag, Make sure to change your GTM- , and Analytics code above.

<!-- Google Tag Manager -->
<amp-analytics config="https://www.googletagmanager.com/amp.json?id=GTM-XXXXXX&gtm.url=SOURCE_URL" data-credentials="include"></amp-analytics>
<!-- Google Tag Manager -->

Testing the GTM Tags

Jump to this Free Tag Tester here : https://amptagtest.appspot.com/

If everything is Green, you have set everything correctly now see how your Bounce rates go down.

AMP Analytics Limitation

AMP Analytics Limitations As Per Google

Official google link here. That Mentions this Limitation

• Session unification via AMP linker will not happen if a first-time user closes out the AMP page without navigating to next page since the session unification works using link decoration.

If you use two versions AMP and NON-AMP you should follow the above google URL and then implement the same on your NON-AMP Site Versions.

AMP Analytics Tested On WordPress

The above steps were done on a WordPress Latest Version with AMP Original Plugin as a Native Mode, I have also written a post on getting Native Version AMP on WordPress

All the Screenshots Above in this post are taken from Google Tag Manager, A Google Product ©2018 Google LLC, Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google LLC.