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Why the bounce rate of AMP pages is so high
- jgalt212 10y agoThere may be 3.5B humans with access to the internet, but if you sum up all the publishers there are probably 12B MAUs. http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/
- ForrestN 10y agoI'm not sure that's good math, if I understand you correctly. Because a person can be a MAU of many sites, adding up the MAU counts of various websites doesn't tell you anything about whether or not publishers are exaggerating.
- jgalt212 10y agoIt was more a sarcastic remark than math. i.e. per the metrics there are more people on the internet than there are actual people. or put another way, has anyone mistakenly under-reported their traffic numbers?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Neliquat 10y agoI too, am many people on the internet, yet singular in the physical.
- cramforce 10y agoThis effect is similar to what is measured when transferring from a WebView (such a Facebook's) to a real browser, since sessions do not transfer. Means the first pageview is considered as a bounce and the second as another unique visitor. The AMP team is working with analytics vendors to display data as realistic as possible. At AMPConf on Tuesday eBay gave a great talk how to deal with this phenomenon. Video will be out soon.
- berns 10y agoIs this the talk? https://youtu.be/lX8szUWpfjk?t=2h21m3s https://youtu.be/lX8szUWpfjk?t=2h21m3s
- callahad 10y agoYep! That's the one
- SquareWheel 10y agoThis correct answer was one of the first posted on this story. So color me disappointed that the top comment is now some unrelated rant about AMP and how evil Google is instead.
- theWatcher37 10y agoBecause it should be. AMP is generally a terrible experience and the exact opposite direction the web should be going in. How anyone at google ever signed off on this is beyond me.
- SquareWheel 10y agoYou find it terrible, perhaps, but users seem to love it.
- CaptSpify 10y agoThe problem it is solving is very real, and users love that. We could solve it by encouraging good site design instead though, and that would be a better solution.
- soared 10y agoYou can put your google analytics snippet on AMP pages and then you don't break sessions. Bounce rate still increases significantly.
- pjc50 10y agoIsn't this almost the "point" of AMP - keeping users on the Google home page and enabling them to get the info quickly, while discouraging the usual clutter of links and ads that try to keep users on a particular site? (Edit: not that this is necessarily great for publishers or the ecosystem!)
- draw_down 10y agoYes!
- onli 10y agoIs it? It was not the deal as I understood it when it was introduced. Granted, maybe I missed it. For me, I understood it as a HTML subset, a method for image scaling, and an overall goal of having clutter free sites that work well on mobile. I knew there was a cache somewhere, too. But that users stay on googles site and the url won't be shown was not clear to me. There was a very popular article on here about someone who implemented AMP and got surprised by this, the header change of copying the original url goes back to this.
- callahad 10y agoIf you want the AMP "lightning bolt of trust" and want to be eligible for the "Top Stories" carousel, you have to allow Google to cache and re-serve your content from their AMP Cache. Opting out of caching requires making your page intentionally invalid, and thus you lose all of the presentation and pre-rendering benefits of AMP.
- onli 10y agoYeah, I realize that now, just saying that this did not match what I understood what AMP should be, when it was released. I don't think it was obvious that "users will stay on google's site" was the clear point of it. By now I read all the horror stories, have a better picture of what it technically actually is, and opted not to support it for my sites.
- wfh 10y agoNot familiar with tracking metrics but what is "bounce rate"?
- maroonblazer 10y agoThe number of users who come to your site and take no action divided by the total number of users who come to your site. You could also replace "users" with "visits" as some people do and refer to "bounced visits".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mxuribe 10y agomaroonblazer defines it correctly, but the layperson gist is: bounce rate represents the percentage of people who do NOT stick around on your site; they just stop by, and then "bounce" (as in, leave too soon). Since it is expected for site operators to want to keep people engaged on your site, you want the bounce rate to be as low as possible (which would mean that more people are sticking around on your site).
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoSome of that is users (myself included) closing AMP pages, hitting back, and trying to figure out how to load the page I actually requested. I'm still hopeful that publishers will bring a class action lawsuit against Google and force AMP's closure. Sooner the better.
- sjcsjc 10y agoTo my own astonishment, I've started using Bing to avoid AMP.
- olig15 10y agoI've done the same. Actually pretty surprised how good general search results are which is fine on mobile. I do still use google on desktop though, because it does help that google knows who I am to give me more relevant results (not that I agree that this should be how it works)
- sintaxi 10y agoI switched to DuckDuckGo for the same reason.
- Quinner 10y agoPublishers opt-in to AMP. They actually implement their AMP pages. And I'm honestly not sure why you hate pages that load quickly so much.
- shostack 10y agoThe definition of "opt-in" is questionable. Many publishers don't want AMP and would not have implemented it if it weren't fast becoming critical to their survival because they are overly dependent on Google, and Google is leveraging its market dominance to exert control over the ecosystem. This was in response to FB doing Instant Articles which had much the same effect on publishers. They couldn't afford NOT to be on FB, but still lose in the end because publishers have zero leverage these days thanks to Aggregation Theory [1]. [1] https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/
- pwthornton 10y agoAMP pages are designed explicitly to benefit Google over the site in question. They rob the ability to use design to make a site stickier (which would of course make the bounce rate high for AMP pages). I also in general find AMP pages to be a bit of a UX nightmare. Outside of raw speed, I have nothing good to say about AMP pages, and the speed is nowhere near good enough to justify using them. They make the Web a worse place for the sole benefit of Google. They are abusing their monopoly position in search by forcing AMP pages down people's throats.
- vorpalhex 10y agoThey do rob sites of the ability to load 14 fonts, 2Mb of javascript and a gazillion images before letting me read the two paragraphs I want. Just like they also rob you of forcing me to take a survey first, or hounding me for my email, or otherwise preventing me from doing the single thing I want to do (read your content). Your site should be sticky because you have good content, not because you've tricked me into clicking more links.
- liquidise 10y ago"Protect me from sites with bad UX" is a responsibility i would be surprised to see even 2% of users requested of Google. But let's pretend you are right. There are a number of solutions Google could have used to combat that very issue, such as punishing sites with long load times or exorbitant number of external assets. None of them needed to involve not sending you to a website in the name of altruism.
- lloydde 10y agoI don't think Google has the usability of this correct. I don't like how awkard it feels to truly get to the article on the website and the URL. Having said that, I'm enjoying the speed and readability. Is this opt-in for the publishers? How different is this from from browser's blocking pop ups? I prefer not to using a pop up blocker, so I experience the web like the general population. But I was so sick of publishers forcing ad clicks on mobile by effectively blocking scrolling on smaller form factor devices like my iPhone SE, that I've switched to the Brave browser.
- iainmerrick 10y agoI still don't fully understand AMP. Why is it any different/better than a normal CDN? It seems like Google could do the same kind of caching with existing CDNs. Is it just that you're not allowed to use third-party plugins for ads and tracking, and instead have to use a single standard Google plugin?
- callahad 10y agoMy understanding is that AMP wants to make it impossible to write poorly-performing websites. For example, all externally fetched resources, like images, must have explicit dimensions specified in markup. This makes it possible to statically lay out the page, without blocking on any dependencies aside from the AMP library and the page markup itself. Third-party JavaScript is forbidden, etc. Similarly, page analytics are all collected once, by a single AMP library, and then distribuetd to as many endpoints as you want, instead of each analytics endpoint having to duplicate the work of collection. There are trade-offs. AMP is restrictive (no third-party JavaScript, limits on CSS, etc.), the AMP library itself is 200 KB (60 KB gzipped), and AMP is ultimately controlled entirely by Google, though the core team is interested in recruiting external maintainers.
- iainmerrick 10y agoWhy not just convert your page to use the AMP style, but still use your own CDN to deliver it? That way you get most of the benefits but retain control.
- discreditable 10y agoI got a 500 error the first few times trying to hit the site. Here's a mirror: https://archive.fo/1spsM https://archive.fo/1spsM
- odammit 10y agoTechnically speaking, it's due to the shitty experience.
- wiremine 10y agoI worked on a real-time analytics product based on Snowplow, and I came to the conclusion that bounce rate is fairly meaningless metric (at least, in and of itself). When you are able to track actual engagement based on active time on page, the bounce rate becomes almost worthless as an indicator of success. We measured "active time on page" based on how engaged the user was on the page: were they scrolling, clicking, moving the mouse on a focused page, etc. It wasn't perfect, but it was much more helpful to publishers than Google Analytics' page-level metrics. [1] http://snowplowanalytics.com/ http://snowplowanalytics.com/
- christian_wilde 10y agoDid you actually read the post? :)
- wiremine 10y agoI did. :) My point is that bounce rate is meaningless, regardless of if you're looking at AMP or non-AMP content. Maybe that was stated?
- christian_wilde 10y agoBounce rate was just used as an example. I agree that it can be meaningless depending on the type of website. The problem is not about bounce rate, is about cookies and the inability of tracking users correctly. Give it another read ;)
- soared 10y agoHonestly any metric by itself is not a good indication of failure/success. Without context a single metric is meaningless? High CTR means good performance.. or click fraud. High pages per sessions means engaged users.. or poor web design.
- johnhenry 10y agoI wonder if this suggests that we might need to change our definition "bounce rate". Let's say I just want to see the first paragraph or so of an article. Often, I wait seconds before a page loads fully and this contributes to me having "not bounced". But if the first page loads quickly, I may be finished with everything I need before this occurs.
- ssharp 10y agoThe top data table, comparing AMP vs. non-AMP traffic, that makes up the reason for this investigation seems flawed. They did correctly isolate organic traffic to blog posts, however the "Trafico NO AMP" group might contain desktop traffic which, in my experience, has a lower bounce rate.
- omouse 10y agobecause it takes over my browser and I want to use Pocket or Firefox's mobile view -_-'
- nsomaru 10y agoGoing by these AMP comment threads, I must be in the minority, but my browsing habits dictate that I hardly ever see AMP content when browsing from my phone. I mostly Google specific things or click links from HN.
- moomin 10y agoWell, AMP pages on my phone open with a banner at the top with an X on it. When I press the X to get rid of the banner, it closes the page. Wonder how much of the bounce is that UI fail?
- corobo 10y agoBecause you forget the damn "X" button closes you back to the search results rather than gets rid of the AMP view meaning you bounce then come back -- if anyone else is like me anyway
- manigandham 10y agoEvery time AMP comes up it shows itself as a massive mistake. Yes, it makes sites load faster. Publishers could already do this themselves since it's just HTML optimization. And Google was in the perfect place to force this by penalizing search traffic based on load speed - they even have the entire pagespeed and mobile readiness test suites for this. Also many sites are slow because of ads - and Google runs the biggest and slowest ad network of all with DoubleClick. AMP is probably the most convoluted solution for all of this, likely created as an experiment by a small internal team but then expanded by management that should've known better. Now sites have to spend limited dev resources on maintaining a proprietary fork of HTML just for google traffic rather than working on better universal sites. After all the noise about optimizations and responsive design, this is a big step back.
- chickenfries 10y agoIf DoubleClick stopped being so slow, I could really give AMP pages a run for their money.