For a World That Won't Wait: AMP

Photo by Christian Englmeier on Unsplash.

One of the biggest challenges facing digital advertising companies today is mobile users.

Clearly, potential customers who are increasingly using mobile to communicate, research, and view online content are becoming smarter and more educated, as well as less patient with slow pages and their ads.

We now live in a digital world where a short time of just a few seconds can affect the success or failure of an advertising campaign. More specifically, pages and ads that take more than a second to fully load can sometimes cause huge financial losses to the advertising company.

What is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google-affiliated technology whose sole purpose is to improve the loading speed of pages for mobile web users.

AMP is based on the HTML AMP, which is another version of the same code that builds the structure of the web. AMP HTML is part of an open-source framework designed to speed up mobile pages.

The framework also uses AMP JS and AMP CDN. AMP JS is a JavaScript framework for mobile sites, and AMP CDN is an optional content delivery network (CDNs generally crawl your web pages and distribute them across multiple servers in different geographical locations, making uploads faster. To users close to those places).

AMP removes parts of the branding from the screen for better speed. This has caused concern among some critics, who believe that by doing so, fake news may be legitimized and seen as much as content produced by reputable news agencies such as the Guardian or NPR.

Among the elements of the page that are removed to reduce loading time, two elements are more important for marketers and advertising companies:

• Any form. Such as registration form or user information receipt form.
• Any external JavaScript element.
• (Of course, there are solutions to these limitations, which require additional code to be written).

After removing these "irrelevant" sections of code and branding, the AMP page can load 15 to 80% faster than the original version of the page without deleting even a basic function for the user.

It is quite possible to create pages with separate sections using some advanced performance optimization tools. But it is better for professional programmers to do this.

Most small business website owners do not have the time or resources to do this.

The Google AMP app helps these people get mobile pages faster and easier for their users without having to spend a lot of time and money developing the technology.

Setting up AMP is relatively easy for publishers. The main AMP integration process requires two versions of the page that you want to be the result of AMP work, valid code, CSS integration style, and a new canonical tag in the main version of the page. AMP Integration for WordPress Sites uses plugins for convenience.

You need to remember that we are talking specifically about mobile users in this text, and Google AMP is not for desktop or laptop users. But mobile users are increasingly becoming an important part of the target audience of advertising companies. Statistics show that mobile usage among users is constantly increasing.

So, it is important to keep mobile users happy and AMP is a useful way to do this.

How does AMP work with on-screen ad networks?

The AMP Project provides a basic overview of AMP integration with advertising.

AMP is primarily focused on improving the mobile user experience of using the web. Although the overall goal of this project is a better user experience, part of that goal is to support and provide technology for greater security and speed of advertising.

Ads on AMP pages behave much like their original version on web pages. The page publisher, like the main pages, uses JavaScript to add a <amp-ad> tag to the AMP page to allow space for ads on a particular network.

Then when a user clicks on the link on that AMP page, the defined tag sends a request to the ad network to display the ads in the space provided. AMP works with a large number of supported ad networks. Like AdSense or Zucks.

What does AMP do for your ads?

Because AMP requires pages that have separation code without external JavaScript or complex HTML elements, it has so far been used more for static pages that consist primarily of textual content. Such as blog posts and articles that you may have seen at the top of the Google mobile search page.

This has changed recently. Google AMP has been expanded to include ads and landing pages (via ALP or Accelerated Landing Pages, which is a framework similar to AMP and specifically targets landing pages). In the past, ads loaded inside an AMP page at low speeds, while the page around the ad could load in less than a second.

Remember that AMP affects advertisers in two ways, and both are equally important. First of all, AMP affects the loading of the page itself (except for the ad). This impact in itself will be significant for potential users.

The faster the page loads, the better the user experience; Because it puts the user in a better and more acceptable situation to see the ad.

On the other hand, delaying the page loading will significantly reduce the conversion rate (up to a 12% reduction per second delay in full-page loading). If this process takes too long, the visitor may leave the page and you will lose him/her completely.

What does "too much" mean here? It may be hard to believe, but the time it takes for the screen to overload is about three seconds or less. Now keep in mind that most pages with mobile ads take about 6.9 seconds to fully load. These advertisers do not have a chance to show themselves to the user and impress him.

Additionally, when a user stops visiting the page, they will most likely never visit the page again. Worse, some of these users will share their bad experiences with friends and acquaintances. But AMP pages load in less than a second, which makes the user feel instantly satisfied because he can find the content he wants faster.

The improved user experience by your page prepares the audience's mind to see and follow the ad message. The second effect of AMP is that it also speeds up the loading of the ad itself. Even if the page loads quickly but the ad is not loaded and a blank space is displayed, the user may scroll and never see the ad.

A page that uses AMP technology will not have this problem. The ad will load almost immediately with the entire page and the user is more likely to click on it. As a result, the conversion rate will also increase. This will have a huge impact on your marketing.

Now we want to see what will happen by putting all the sections together. Imagine a member of your target community browsing the web on mobile, searching for information about a product or service that your company offers.

This user sees several AMP pages in the Google results from list that are in the top priority of the results. One of these pages is the mobile-friendly version of the Buyer Guide page on a website that has content for you.

This page will be loaded immediately on the user's mobile. An ad will then be displayed to the user which, when clicked, will take you to your website. This step will also be done using ALP, like a high-speed AMP screen.

All in all, the benefits of AMP for everyone are:

• The user will have a better user experience.
• The better UX will benefit advertisers and marketers by increasing the conversion rate

Publishers of pages containing ads also benefit from this. Because more effective ads will lead to more clicks and as a result, the demand for ads on those pages will also increase.

Why Should You Be Careful?

What may be said may seem too great. But the truth is that for some reason you need to be careful about using AMP on your pages and ads.

The main reason for caution is your audience. If the audience is not aware of the mechanism of AMP pages, they may not trust the search results that are prioritized at the top of the list, or they may, by experience, be indifferent to the banner ads on AMP pages.

But with the expansion of this program and the use of AMP, there is a possibility of change.

The Last Word:

If in general, your conversion rate from ads on mobile pages is not high, you can try the AMP campaign and examine its impact on your business.