Are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) right for your business?

Forty percent of users drop off your page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. That’s how small your window is to get engaging content to your users’ eyeballs. To add to that, seventy percent of users have a lower opinion of companies that use pop-up ads. While seventy-five percent of users don’t scroll past the first page of search results. Accelerated Mobile Pages give you an advantage by addressing all these issues. In this article, we provide an overview of the problem and how Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) can solve the problem for you.

Solution at a glance

You want to:

• Improve your user experience by delivering fast loading speeds.
• Aid your SEO to get more relevant traffic to your site.
• Track the difference AMP has brought to your business.

We help you:

Implement AMP into your existing architecture to improve speed and help push your content to the top of search results.

The challenge

Smartphones are ubiquitous in our daily lives, which means the internet is in your customer’s pocket, allowing them to find your website, app or business with a few taps. You expect the same fast web browsing experience on any device you own or use, be it PCs, smartphones or tablets. Also, consider the role Google's search engine plays in driving customers to your business. Most people who use the internet today rely on Google to find just about anything. AMP is an essential tool, which ensures good rankings and visibility on the web.

Emerging markets like India, China, and Brazil are caught in a digital divide between wealthy urban areas and rural districts. These markets come with their challenges, like fickle networks and cheap data plans.

What is AMP?

Simply put, AMP is an open-source collaborative project to speed up mobile pages. Web pages optimized with AMP are quick to load because they focus on loading content the user sees first and things like unoptimised images, Javascript, social plugins and ad banners later. This is an open-source initiative, spearheaded by Google.

AMP optimized pages appear in a mobile search results carousel. These pages feature an AMP icon that has a thunderbolt inside a circle along with the AMP acronym.

Instead of building a new proprietary product, Google created an open platform, optimizing the traditional mobile web browsing experience. AMP is essentially HTML5 with a bunch of added requirements and rules. There are three core parts to AMP:

• AMP HTML
• JavaScript (AMP JS)
• Content Delivery Network (AMP Cache)

AMP HTML is almost the same HTML extended with custom AMP properties. You optimize JavaScript, customize your styling using CSS3, and then cache the pages. You can use the AMP JS library to help you put in place the best performance practices. Google’s AMP Cache functions with the support of your Content Delivery Network (CDN) and is the most important feature of your AMP implementation.

How does AMP work?

Faster speeds:

Preloading takes center stage. Before you click on any article, Google begins pre-rendering and caching content. Caching allows Google’s global network of data centers to host your content or pages on Google’s servers, allowing Google to load and serve the content for you. AMP in its simplest form is designed to help static content load faster on mobile devices than your typical web page. They achieve this by prioritizing static content over interactive content. As AMP pages load, things like images do not load until they’re scrolled into view. AMP prioritizes textual content, pictures, then your video content and more data-intensive features.

Better SEO:

When you implement AMP, you ensure your articles and blog posts are featured in the Top Stories Section of the Google search results page. This doesn’t mean you can disregard other search engine best practices. Loading speed is an important part of search engine ranking. Chances are, you’ll get fewer bounces after you implement AMP because it takes less time to load, which also boosts your ranking.

Superior User Experience:

AMP does away with unnecessary components that hinder your site from loading instantly. This ensures your site is less cluttered which makes it easier for your users to engage with your content. AMP pages might be simplified, but they still incorporate ads, analytics, and paywall support. Advertisements, however, aren’t allowed to obscure text in an AMP page, doing away with pop-ups.

Measure with Analytics:

You can track how well AMP is working for you by integrating Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics or many other popular analytics platforms. With AMP, you still track all the standard metrics like clicks and conversions.

Who is it meant for?

AMP is not just for publishers trying to push their news stories to the top of Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). AMP is relevant across Industries. As an integral part of improving your SERPs, AMP helps you create and sustain your online brand.

Take E-commerce for instance. The AMP results carousel and other components can be leveraged to drive more traffic to the products you sell on your site. eBay powers their mobile site using AMP.

AMP is an essential tool to ensure good ranking and visibility because the slow-loading content is pushed down SERPs by Google. So, even if your SEO is up to the mark, your page load speed might impact where your content appears on a SERP. Banking and financial companies, Advertising firms, online agencies and eCommerce companies all benefit from AMP pages.

In some cases, the integration is difficult because AMP is still evolving. It doesn't support all web platforms yet. Nevertheless, if you choose the right partners to guide you, ideally, somebody who’s partnered with Google, you will get a better understanding of the effort involved in implementing AMP on your web applications.