Issue with GA tracking and Native AMP

[winefolly]

Hi everyone,

We recently pushed a new version of our site (winefolly.com), which is completely AMP native on WordPress (using the official AMP for WordPress plugin). As part of the update, we also switched over to https. In hindsight we probably should have pushed the AMP version and HTTPS changes in separate updates.

As a result of the update, the traffic in GA has dropped significantly despite the tracking code being added properly. I'm also having a hard time getting the previous views in GA working properly.

The three views are:

• Sitewide (shop.winefolly.com and winefolly.com)
• Content only (winefolly.com)
• Shop only (shop.winefolly.com)

The sitewide view seems to be working, though it's hard to know for sure, as the traffic seems pretty low (like 10 users at any given time) and I think that it's more that it's just picking up the shop traffic.

The content only view shows maybe one or two users and often none at all. I tried a bunch of different filters to only track to the main sites content views, but in one instance the filter would work, then half an hour later it would revert to no traffic. The filter is set to custom > exclude > request uri with the following regex pattern:

^shop.winefolly.com$|^checkout.shopify.com$|/products/.|/account/.|/checkout/.|/collections/.|./orders/.|/cart|/account|/pages/.|/poll/.|/?mc_cid=.|/profile?.|/?u=.|/webstore/.

Testing the filter it strips out anything not related to the main sites content, but when I save the filter and view the updated results, the changes aren't reflected. I did read that there is a delay in the filters being applied and only a subset of the available data is used, but I just want to be sure I'm adding the filters correctly.

I also tried setting the filter to predefined, exclude host equal to shop.winefolly.com, but that didn't work either.

The shop view seems to be working, but the tracking code is added via Shopify, so it makes sense that it would continue working as before.

The first thing I noticed when I checked the views is that they were still set to http, so I updated the urls to https. I then checked the GA tracking code (which is added as a json object in the Analytics setting in the WordPress plugin. Unfortunately, while GA seems to be recording traffic, none of the GA validators seem to pickup the AMP tracking code (adding using the amp-analytics tag), despite the json being confirmed as valid by the plugin.

This morning I decided to try a different approach and add the tracking code via Googles Tag Manager, as well as adding the new https domain to the Google Search Console, but alas no change.

I spent the whole day yesterday reading every post I could on the topic, but was not able to find any a solution, so I'm really hoping someone on Moz will be able to shed some light as to what I'm doing wrong.

Any suggestions or input would be very much appreciated.

Cheers,
Chris (on behalf of WineFolly.com)

[KaneJamison]

Lots going on here, so, a laundry list of follow up questions and thoughts for you...

Are you seeing AMP results showing up in the Search Console? Are you seeing them indexed as intended?

If you're doing Native AMP, you won't be able to diagnose pages by /amp URL types of formatting. It might be worth trying to fire off an event, or custom dimension in GA, for AMP = Yes / No or something like that.

For the sitewide view, have you tested loading pages on a private browser and incognito mobile browser and seeing if they show up in GA realtime in each of the 3 views when they're supposed to?

It looks like you might be using Cloudflare - I haven't dealt with an AMP site that uses it, but have you checked whether there are compatibility issues or anything you need to activate?

Are any Google Tag Manager pages set to fire on HTTPS only?

Are any GA filters in place that specify HTTP/HTTPS that need to be broadened?

Your Amp Analytics code seems to match the one on a site that is functioning as intended, so I don't think it's a formatting issue.

For the GA view filter - it seems like you should be able to simply include/exclude traffic to shop.winefolly.com - why the added complexity beyond that?