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The analysis on the google analytics data seems a bit biased against AMP. - decrease in average positions in SERPs on mobile - decrease in CTR on mobile - high

The analysis on the google analytics data seems a bit biased against AMP. - decrease in average positions in SERPs on mobile - decrease in CTR on mobile - higher number of impressions - slight increase in total clicks These measures are correlated. You can't just add them all together. More impressions with the same amount of clicks means CTR (click through rate) will drop. Average position should also drop. In this case we see a slight increase in total clicks and almost double impressions! What if adding AMP makes Google show your site to a wider range of audience (more variance on target audience), while assigning your pages a lower weight (average position). You would get this behaviour. Lower average position but more clicks. This could lower your account creation and similar metrics because users are less interested. What I mean is for some websites, getting more clicks would be great. If your total clicks is the goal, you would like these results (ex: page with ads). For search users, this is not good because we are shown pages that are less relevant. I would like more explanations on mobile leads, account creation, and newsletter email sign-ups dropped. Why not show plots? Are these compared to total from previous months or percentages? We should also need to be able to compare both websites (mobile vs AMP) to see if there are any major differences. I am not an SEO expert or web designer but I personally use AMP on my modest website. I don't even have a desktop version. Only AMP. It is simpler that way and took only an afternoon (for a css noob) to switch. What made me switch was their amp-img carousel lightbox. They are simple to use and just work. I tried a plethora of css/js carousel or album viewers and chose AMP. Bonus page speed and better mobile search cards.

le205 8y ago
Very much agree with this comment. It’s quite likely that the AMP pages received incremental impressions in lower positions, which reduced the overall average position but increased clicks. The screenshot of rankings from another tool (looks like Accuranker) with a few +1 ranking improvements after disabling AMP also seems insignificant. Often this kind of fluctuation is very normal. Without knowing the baseline level of ranking fluctuation, it’s hard to read too much into this. This is the danger of analysing ‘totals’ without segmentation to better track incrementality. Any test needs to be properly controlled to form clear conclusions and I don’t see enough rigor here. I would however commend the article on its advice to avoid simply ‘disabling’ AMP after using it for a period of time. There is cleanup to be done as the article touches on, and I suspect many may not be aware.

le205 8y ago

Very much agree with this comment. It’s quite likely that the AMP pages received incremental impressions in lower positions, which reduced the overall average position but increased clicks. The screenshot of rankings from another tool (looks like Accuranker) with a few +1 ranking improvements after disabling AMP also seems insignificant. Often this kind of fluctuation is very normal. Without knowing the baseline level of ranking fluctuation, it’s hard to read too much into this. This is the danger of analysing ‘totals’ without segmentation to better track incrementality. Any test needs to be properly controlled to form clear conclusions and I don’t see enough rigor here. I would however commend the article on its advice to avoid simply ‘disabling’ AMP after using it for a period of time. There is cleanup to be done as the article touches on, and I suspect many may not be aware.