Google on Tuesday announced support for accelerated mobile pages (AMP) in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), rolling out to publishers today.
With the GA4 migration deadline days away, Google
has not slowed down the list of updates for the platform.
Google AMP, an open-source technology, allows publishers to create and serve content at much faster speeds across the web. The
company says this integration is critical for publishers choosing to use AMP to help continue to track metrics with GA4.
This integration previously only existed in Universal Analytics,
so bringing it to GA4 allows for parity and helps publishers make a seamless transition.
It’s estimated that 28.1 million websites as of March 2023 use Google Analytics but with only days away from the migration, approximately 11,481,547 live
websites as of June 2023, have made the move to Google Analytics 4.
AMP pages are similar to HTML and load in any browser, but a Google tag, gtag.js, on an AMP
page Mobile Pages is not available to use, so a different Analytics tag is provided specifically for AMP.
Google says that user identifiers are randomly generated and stored either
in local Storage or cookies.
The ID is reset when the user clears cookies and local storage.
In Google Analytics 4, IP masking is not necessary, since IP addresses are not
logged or stored, so by default the AMP tag never logs IP addresses.
To use Analytics on AMP pages, Google requires users to:
- Disclose how Analytics collects and uses data, and
offer users the opportunity to opt-out of Analytics. They can do this by linking to the Google privacy and terms,
which includes a link to the Analytics opt-out page.
- Use the AMP Analytics tag on their mobile pages, and refer to
the AMP Analytics spec on Google Developers.