Google AMP Story Analytics, using Segment

Question

I am trying to use Segment to track analytics on Google AMP Stories. I want to track what page of the story a viewer taps to, and other ways they interact with the story.

I am using Segment's AMP Mobile Source and followed the Documentation. I added the Page excerpt of code inside of each amp-story-page component:

<amp-analytics type="segment">
<script type="application/json">
  {
    "vars": {
      "writeKey": "WRITE_KEY",
      "name": "my page name"
    }
  }
</script>
</amp-analytics>

When I tested the code using Segments Debugger tool, it triggered the call to Segment when the pages were loaded, not when they were viewed.

Then I tried to incorporate triggers from the AMP story GitHub page

"triggers": {
  "storyPageVisible": {
    "on": "story-page-visible",
    "request": "event"
  }
}

but I could not make this work because I don't have a request handler for segment...when running my code with this trigger I get error:

Ignoring event. Request string not found:  event

I also tried using similar code to Washington Post which uses Google analytics to track their AMP stories but I ran into the same problem as the code above. Here is Washington Posts code:

  <amp-analytics type="googleanalytics" id="googleanalytics1">
 <script type="application/json">
   {
      "vars": {
        "account": "UA-50597120-8"
      },
      "triggers": {
        "trackPageview": {
          "on": "story-page-visible",
          "request": "pageview",
          "extraUrlParams": {
            "cd1": "STORY_PAGE_INDEX",
            "cd2": "STORY_PAGE_ID",
            "cd3": "13"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  </script>
  </amp-analytics>

If anyone can help me track when my AMP story pages are viewed, that would be great.

Answer 1

Since you are using Segment as the supported analytics vendor for AMP, it is best to contact/consult vendor's documentation for more specific details on how to set this up and for further information.

In general, user experience of AMP story enables a user to traverse several "pages" without loading new HTML pages each time. To record pageview events there could be one of the two approaches as stated below:

• To count each story-page-visible event as a typical pageview (i.e. as if a user is visiting a new HTML page);
• Another approach could be to capture story-page-visible events as their own type of event.
• Using amp-analytics you can re-assign the story-page-visible event to behave like a “pageview” event, which is a common vendor-specified event type

GitHub Resource Link: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions/amp-story/amp-story-analytics.md