AMP

Fast Ad Landing Pages with AMP

Uncategorized

Page load time is one of the strongest reasons of page bounce. The average U.S. retail mobile site loaded in 6.9 seconds in July 2016, and according to the most recent data, 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load [source].  This means that if you’re navigating users to a landing page from an ad, 40% will likely not bother and click away. Furthermore, a click to a landing page often takes the user out of context so it’s hard for them to return to the publisher’s site, making the whole experience very disruptive. This is not just bad for the user experience but also bad for publisher and advertiser monetization.

Introducing AMP Ad Landing Pages

Blog1
Difference in how regular ad landing pages load vs how AMP Ad Landing Pages load

To ensure users have a great experience with ads, we’re introducing AMP Ad Landing Pages (ALP), which are landing pages that are built in AMP-HTML that load incredibly fast. Early tests indicate that the median load time for these pages is under one second. We’ve introduced a number of optimizations to improve the loading experience before the user even navigates to the landing page:

  1. Pre-connect to landing page: Normal ads do not typically know the URL of the actual landing page. Ads leading to ALPs always know it, and thus can issue a pre-connect request to the respective landing page, which reduces the time it takes to navigate the user to the landing page after the user clicks.
  2. Pre-fetch landing pages: Simple non-CPU intensive resources that are visible on the first viewport of the landing page are requested and downloaded before the user clicks on the ad.
  3. Delivering Google Cache URL when available: As a trafficker, when you input a canonical destination URL for a creative, the ad server can switch it to the AMP version of the URL (with trafficker consent) using the AMP URL API. The ad server can also embed code required by the creative to pre-fetch and pre-connect to the landing page. Ad servers like DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) are integrating such features over the next couple of quarters to make trafficking of AMP landing pages easy.
  4. Zero Redirects: When possible, AMP eliminates redirects to the ad server. So what happens with the redirects? AMP will initiate the requests once the user has reached the landing page. AMP also supports the amp-pixel component for 3rd party tracking redirects which can be performed on the landing page.

Below is an example of the ALP experience. A user is being served an ad with an AMP Landing Page on the Google Search viewer. Not only does the landing page load in under a second, the user can easily navigate back to the content they were reading before their click on the ad.

AMP Landing Pages experience shown in a Google Search flow

We think that a better ad landing page experience is better for the entire ads ecosystem:

  • Users are more likely to click on ads they may be interested in if they know they’ll have a positive experience;
  • Advertisers benefit from increased user engagement and higher conversion rates;
  • Publishers increase revenue with better performing ads, while ensuring that users can get back to their content anytime they want.

Getting started with ALP

If you are a publisher:

AMP landing pages are very well suited to serving sponsored content pages or house marketing pages. If you publish your sponsored content as AMP, similar to how you do for other content, follow the instructions listed below for trafficking in your adserver and you are all set.

If you are an advertiser:

More than 650,000 domains and growing, already publish AMP pages today.

Get started with AMP Ad Landing pages by launching AMP versions of your campaign landing pages. Head to AMP’s Get Started tutorial to learn how. These pages can be highly interactive and fast with AMP components like carousel, video, light box etc. You’ll be able to customize them even more using amp-iframe to embed components not yet supported by AMP.

What’s next?

The AMP project was launched with the goal of making the entire mobile web experience faster and better for everybody. AMP Ad Landing pages is a key initiative to improving the user’s experience of ads on mobile and ensuring that we build a sustainable model for monetization.

This project is in early stages with much more to come. If you have ideas or a use case that isn’t currently supported, or if you’re looking for more information on how you can contribute, come say hi on Github. In the meantime, check out detailed instructions for how to traffic an ad campaign in DFP with AMP landing pages.

Posted by Vamsee Jasti, Product Manager, AMP Project