AMP

AMP: A year in review

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A lot can happen in a year when people unite around a common cause.  In the case of the open source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, that means improving the mobile web for everyone. That’s a tall order in a world dominated by nearly 7 billion small screens, but as we celebrate the first anniversary of AMP we are making headway.  

From day one, a key focus for AMP has been speed.  It is arguably one of the most frustrating things about the mobile web — borne out by recent Google research that shows that 53% of people will leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less. That’s the worst of all worlds for users, businesses, publishers, websites and the mobile web as a whole.

To date the AMP project has been a story about momentum. This is clear in everything from the pace of releases of the open source code to the number of participants embracing the AMP format:

So just how is that speed translating for publishers and websites that have AMP’d up their content?   Well, among news publishers, the first to get on board with AMP, there are a number of case studies that highlight some real benefits when content loads fast:

  • Washington Post — 23% increase in mobile search users who return within 7 days
  • Slate — 44% increase in monthly unique visitors and a 73% increase in visits per monthly unique visitor
  • Gizmodo — 80% of Gizmodo’s traffic from AMP pages is new traffic, 50% increase in impressions
  • Wired —  25% increase in click through rates from search results, with CTR on ads in AMP stories up by 63%.
  • Relay Media — in the last 30 days alone has converted over 2.5 million AMP pages for publishers like The Daily Dot, Hearst Television and The Miami Herald which says mobile users who start with an AMP article spend 10% more time than those who land on regular mobile pages.

There is little doubt that faster is better when it comes to content.  Not surprisingly, the same is true for ads.  A DoubleClick study earlier this year comparing ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers found that:

  • 80%+ of the publishers realized higher viewability rates
  • 90%+ of the publishers drove greater engagement with higher CTRs
  • The majority of the publishers saw higher eCPMs (Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)

And in this case study, one of Europe’s biggest native advertising platforms, plista, conducted its own experiment among premium publishers like n-tv.de, faz.net, abendzeitung.de, and golem.de to measure AMP’s impact on web app widget speed and profitability.

  • For one publisher, CTRs were 600% greater after the implementation of AMP
  • The average increase for publishers in the test was 220%

This open source initiative is thriving because there is a strong community behind it getting involved in everything from working groups to contributing to the Github page with suggestions, feedback and code spec.

While the first year of the AMP Project has gotten off to a good start, there still remains a lot of work ahead.  The AMP roadmap is a good way to stay up to date on what is happening next.  We look forward to returning in a year’s time with even more awesome progress as we work together to make the mobile web great for everyone.  

Posted by David Besbris, VP Google Search, AMP Project Lead at Google

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