Accelerated Mobile Pages are quite literally Google’s response Facebook’s Instant Articles. In collaboration with other publishers such as Google, Twitter, and WordPress, the AMP project was announced in 2015.
An open source initiative, AMPs are essentially a streamlined, simplified form of HTML that is designed to for your pages to load quickly. With AMPs, users have navigated away from the landing page’s native site with a simplified shortcut.
Particularly on mobile platforms, speed is vital to minimize the chances of your user dropping out of the page. Statistics from Kissmetrics show that 4 in 10 people will ‘abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load’. That’s right folks, that’s 3 seconds. Your audience does not have a very high tolerance for waiting time, and your site best be matching, if not exceeding these expectations.
Advertisers have a vested interest in the loading time of web pages on mobile as well – because every drop out means that your target audience didn’t stay long enough to view your wonderful advert. So, there are plenty of wins for companies, advertisers, and consumers when it comes to AMPs – here’s a few to take note of:
Speed
AMPs were essentially created for instant viewing of web pages on mobile. As AMPs consist of limited tags, it is much faster in terms of loading speed. In initial tests, Google reported that the AMP plugin could reduce load time between 15%-85%.
One of the ways AMPs achieves this is by omitting JavaScript while at the same time, serving pages from its own server if you access the AMP page via a Google Search. Both methods significantly lower the loading time which is important for mobile users who might not have the quickest connection speeds when they are on the move.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
While AMP may not be a ranking factor, as confirmed by John Mueller (Webmasters Trends Analyst for Google), it may still have an impact on your site’s SEO. As AMP-optimized sites can lead to a better user experience, this could boost your SEO in the long run. Sites that load instantly, as in the case of AMPs, can also be shared quicker so that eventually your page can gain traction and visibility.
The effect of AMPs on SEO may not be direct, as it isn’t in itself a direct factor in the ranking. However, you do want to take note of how AMP pages are showing up more prevalently in search engine results. A good example would be how AMP-enabled news pages have priority in news search results and will be displayed on the first page of the search engine results.
With Google’s mobile-first approach, it really isn’t all that surprising that incorporating AMPs will have some impact on your site’s SEO.
Monetisation
AMPs are designed to be simple and fast – this means the loading time will be improved especially on the older versions of mobile phones. In turn, this allows site owners to extend their outreach to a wider crowd by providing a decent user experience across mobile phones. A wider outreach should technically translate to higher conversion rates.
And there have been success stories. Ali Express reported a 10.5% increase in conversions and a 27% increase in conversion rate on their site after swapping it to AMP. Google itself has reported that 90% of publishers have seen higher click-through rates with AMP adverts.
There are over 2 billion AMP pages currently is also an indication that it has been, and will continue to be, a worthwhile financial investment in the marketing strategy of most companies and web pages.
Analytics
Data is big, and big data runs the town these days. You can now make important business decision in the smart way – unlock opportunities based on key information and statistics that you can gather about your users.
AMP has analytics that can provide you with important insights about your audience. This includes visitor counts, the number of new and returning users, clicks, conversions, video engagement, link tracking and other measures to assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
With AMP analytics being integrated with Google analytics, you can have crucial information about your users and site usage at the tip of your fingertips.
With its launch, AMPs were expected to change industry standards by a simplified design and quick loading times. While there have been some pushback on the design limitations, the ability of AMPs to promote visibility organically has been enough to warrant it some attention. On a platform that has already been designed for quick, effective dissemination of content, mobile users could only stand to benefit from an even quicker loading time.
Remember, you have 3 seconds to make an impression. AMP will make it count.
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