Google AMP (0.1.0)

Deprecated

Please refer to the latest version of this tracker.

Overview

Snowplow is collaborating with Google on their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMPP or AMP for short). AMP is an open source (Apache License 2.0) initiative to improve the mobile web experience by optimizing web pages for mobile devices.

To learn more about analytics for AMP pages see the amp-analytics reference. For general information about AMP see What Is AMP? on the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project site.

Snowplow is natively integrated into the project, so pages optimized with AMP HTML can be tracked in Snowplow by adding the appropriate amp-analytics tag to your pages:

<amp-analytics type="snowplow" id="snowplow1">
    <script type="application/json">
      {     ...   }   
    </script>   
  </amp-analytics>
</body>

Standard variables

Certain parameters must be provided in the "vars" section of the tag:

"vars": {   ... },

collectorHost

Specify the host to your collector like so:

"vars": {
  "collectorHost": "snowplow-collector.acme.com",
  ...

Notes:

• Do not include the protocol aka schema (http(s)://)
• Do not include a trailing slash
• Use of HTTPS is mandatory in AMP, so your Snowplow collector must support HTTPS

appId

You must set the application ID for the website you are tracking via AMP:

"vars": {
  "appId": "campaign-microsite",
  ...

Notes:

• You do not have to use the appId to distinguish AMP traffic from other web traffic (unless you want to) - see the Analytics section for an alternative approach

Tracking events

The following trigger request values are supported for the Snowplow Analytics configuration:

• pageView for page view tracking
• structEvent for structured event tracking

All event tracking is disabled by default; you can enable it on an event-by-event basis as follows:

Page view

Enable the page view tracking like so:

<amp-analytics type="snowplow" id="snowplow2">
<script type="application/json">
{
  "vars": {
    "collectorHost": "snowplow-collector.acme.com",  // Replace with your collector host
    "appId": "campaign-microsite"                    // Replace with your app ID
  },
  "triggers": {
    "trackPageview": {  // Trigger names can be any string. trackPageview is not a required name
      "on": "visible",
      "request": "pageView"
    }
  }
}
</script>
</amp-analytics>

Structured events

Structured events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load. "Structured" refers to the Google Analytics-style structure of having up to five fields (with only the first two required).

Events can be sent by setting the AMP trigger request value to event and setting the required event category and action fields.

The following example uses the selector attribute of the trigger to send an event when a particular element is clicked:

<amp-analytics type="snowplow" id="snowplow3">
<script type="application/json">
{
  "vars": {
    "collectorHost": "snowplow-collector.acme.com",  // Replace with your collector host
    "appId": "campaign-microsite"                    // Replace with your app ID
  },
  "triggers": {
    "trackClickOnHeader" : {
      "on": "click",
      "selector": "#header",
      "request": "structEvent",
      "vars": {
        "structEventCategory": "ui-components",
        "structEventAction": "header-click"
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>
</amp-analytics>

You can set key-value pairs for the following event fields in the vars attribute of the trigger:

Argument	Description	Required?	Validation
structEventCategory	The grouping of structured events which this action belongs to	Yes	String
structEventAction	Defines the type of user interaction which this event involves	Yes	String
structEventLabel	A string to provide additional dimensions to the event data	No	String
structEventProperty	A string describing the object or the action performed on it	No	String
structEventValue	A value to provide numerical data about the event	No	Int or Float

Analytics

All events sent via this tracker will have:

• v_tracker set to amp-0.1
• platform set to web

If you want to analyze events sent via this tracker, you may prefer to query for v_tracker LIKE 'amp-%' to future-proof your query against future releases of this tracker (which may change the version number).