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How to configure basic analytics for your AMP pages

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Analytics platforms are commonly integrated into websites through inline JavaScript snippets and function calls, which trigger events that are sent back to the analytics system. AMP provides a flexible JSON configuration syntax to replicate this process for several analytics partners.

TIP – If you're using Google Analytics as your analytics provider, learn amp-analytics.

Google Analytics 4 and AMP

For information on how to set up Google Analytics 4 with amp-analytics see amp-analytics dev guide and Tag setup for AMP documentation.

The rest of this document mostly talks about Universal Analytics which is superseded by Google Analytics 4.

For context: Analytics on non-AMP pages

The following is an example of traditional JavaScript-driven Google Analytics tracking. We'll rewrite this into the amp-analytics JSON format but first, let's look at the traditional approach:

<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>

This JavaScript is quite simple; it sends a notification to track the pageview event.

Step 1: Include `amp-analytics` script

To replicate this functionality in AMP, we must first include the amp-analytics component library in our document’s <head>:

<script async custom-element="amp-analytics" src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js"></script>

Step 2: Add configuration code

Then, let's add the amp-analytics component to the end of the body of the document:

<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics">
<script type="application/json">
{
  "vars": {
    "account": "UA-YYYY-Y"
  },
  "triggers": {
    "default pageview": {
      "on": "visible",
      "request": "pageview",
      "vars": {
        "title": "Name of the Article"
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>
</amp-analytics>

Just as with the JavaScript example at the top of this page, this amp-analytics snippet will send a notification to Google Analytics indicating that a page has been viewed.

To specify this, we've set the type to googleanalytics and then in the JSON we've created a trigger we've called "default pageview". This trigger will fire when the page is visible (due to the "on": "visible") and when it fires we'll send a pageview analytics request to Google Analytics with the vars we have specified.

The JSON used to configure amp-analytics is a very flexible format for describing what analytics data to send and when to send it. The amp-analytics has complete details on the format.

Step 3: Adding more triggers

Building on the above example, we can add another trigger named "click on #header trigger":

<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics">
<script type="application/json">
{
  "vars": {
    "account": "UA-YYYY-Y"
  },
  "triggers": {
    "default pageview": {
      "on": "visible",
      "request": "pageview",
      "vars": {
        "title": "Name of the Article"
      }
    },
    "click on #header trigger": {
      "on": "click",
      "selector": "#header",
      "request": "event",
      "vars": {
        "eventCategory": "examples",
        "eventAction": "clicked-header"
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>
</amp-analytics>

As you can guess from the name of this new trigger it will fire when the element with the ID "header" is clicked (specified by "on": "click" and "selector": "#header"). When this trigger fires, we'll send the event request to our analytics provider, specifying a couple of variables to include in the request.

If you have a custom tracking platform that you want to integrate with, you can still use amp-analytics and define your own personalized URL endpoints to send tracking data to. Learn more in the amp-analytics component reference documentation.

NOTE – “UA-YYYY-Y” is an example Google Analytics account; it should be replaced with your own website’s Google Analytics tracking code if you are using this example on your site.

TIP – If you are interested in a simpler tracking system, you might want to take a look at amp-pixel. If you only need to track pageviews, amp-pixel it is a lighter-weight solution than amp-analytics because it only aims to solve the requirements of traditional pixel tracking. Learn more in the Analytics: the basics guide.