Editor’s note: This post is authored by Ben Ward, Product Manager for AMP & Publisher Platform, Twitter. Read more about their support for AMP article analytics here.
Twitter sits at the heart of news, with millions of people using the service to stay updated about what’s happening in the world, right as it happens. An essential part of our mission to keep people informed is in the discovery and reading of news articles. We’ve embraced AMP as a tool to improve that experience for our users, and make our service better.
AMP launched with support for embedding Tweets, and now we’ve built out support for displaying AMP in our mobile clients on iOS, Android and on the web. When a link is Tweeted, Twitter now automatically discovers and displays the AMP editions of articles. In our testing, we’ve found that when people are shown the faster-rendering AMP editions of articles, they build a habit of reading even more articles via Twitter than those without AMP.
Last week we announced a major milestone of our AMP implementation, launching better support for article analytics. Now publishers are able to understand their audience views from Twitter when we render AMP. We’ve made changes that mean existing analytics tools will still record views even when we display the AMP edition of an article, and we’ve enabled AMP pages to access the social referral parameters added to links shared on Twitter.
We like AMP because its design encourages performant web publishing and mobile-centric design of articles. While in the past we’ve also experimented with “reader mode” features in browsers, we love that AMP gives publishers creative control over their content, ensuring that the web remains vibrant, varied and expressive, while also being fast. And of course, AMP natively supports existing advertising platforms, supporting the businesses of publishers who we want to excel on Twitter. As a project, it is developed in the open, welcoming of community contributions, and consumed by multiple independent services, which is well aligned with Twitter’s values.
You can learn about how Twitter uses the AMP editions of articles, and how to optimize your site for our analytics enhancements in our new AMP documentation on the Twitter developer site.
Twitter is using AMP to present news articles faster and more reliably, to better keep people informed of what matters to them, with an improved reading experience. We’re excited to see how publishers continue to embrace the technology, now equipped to understand the impact of Twitter on news audiences.
Posted by Ben Ward, Product Manager for AMP & Publisher Platform, Twitter