Google AMP vs Google Posts….and the winner is….
AMP has created some fascinating results, but it’s Google Posts that can give brands control… they’re just not using it!
The other week I wrote, a somewhat bland, article on how to get on Google Posts and surprisingly it got picked up. So I’ve done a bit more digging to see who’s using it in the Premier League — more on that shortly — and also do Posts deliver above AMP.
What’s the difference between AMP and Posts?
AMP is news served up on mobiles when you type certain keywords into Google. It appears with a lightning symbol the side of it.
Search ‘Man City’ and you get a mix of AMP and Posts on mobile. On desktop, AMP is simply the Google News feed.
Posts, on the other hand, are articles written and selected by the brand themselves, and appear whenever someone searches on that brand term, or terms, within the Google Knowledge Graph card/panel.
It’s a great way to get eyeballs on content that wouldn’t normally appear under those terms in Google News (which displays as AMP on mobile.)
How does AMP stack up against Google Posts?
Lucy Bronze PFA Player of the Year award, an article which wouldn’t have been visible on our Club terms as AMP for long, has one of the highest impressions in our Posts journey so far. YouTube video Post, Leroy Sane in Focus, has one of the highest interactions. Consistent with our other video Posts.
Compared to AMP, City are seeing more impressions via Posts. Though I’d like more analytics around interaction, engagement, sharing etc — Posts doesn’t provide these are yet — the current figures are compelling.
Higher impressions do seem to make sense, for City at least. Posts are surfaced in the Knowledge Panel every time someone searches for our Club terms (man city, mcfc and manchester city) and a decent chunk of our organic search traffic comes from these search terms.
AMP, on the other hand, is battling with other publishers on brand and non-brand search terms. AMP articles change at much higher rate, anyone writing about us and deemed news worthy will appear.
Other evidence? City’s organic search has increased to the new mancity.com domain over the past season, somewhat inevitable given the technical changes and content linking we’ve been employing. I do believe Google Posts has also helped boost this figure since organic traffic is how it is represented in Google Analytics, we add more tracking to test this hypothesis.
Who else is on Google Posts in the Premier League?
As of this morning, Liverpool FC is the only other Club besides ourselves currently using Google posts and they look like they’ve been on it a while.
Their feed is largely text posts with links to the site for the full story — we have a similar approach. There aren’t too many videos on here at present, though there are some, and there are animated gifs too, which is a nice touch. I would expect these garner more engagement…<quickly starts knocking up animated gifs for City’s posts…!!>
The ‘Premier League’ and ‘UEFA’ don’t make use of Posts yet within their Knowledge Panel, though I would hope, as with the other Clubs, this changes over the coming season.
The official word of Clubs and organisations helps to offset rumour, gossip, and that infamous ‘fake news’. Arguably the official sites and social accounts do this — Posts is simply Google’s way of helping to cover search too.
So…AMP or Posts?
You want both.
The visibility of official branded content that you select via Posts and news worthy AMP for other keywords as well as your brand terms.
However, if you have to choose between the two or decide which to implement first, I’d plump for Posts if your brand is strong in search.
It’s quick and easy to get going, the only downside is ongoing daily maintenance — but it takes 30 seconds to add a post though, so is it really a hardship?
AMP will require a bit of dev work into your current content management system (CMS) but very little ongoing maintenance. There are also plenty of plugins for AMP for Wordpress and other CMS’s if this is what you use. I’d anticipate that this will become easier over the coming year.
Google Posts have rolled out to local businesses
Google have made Posts even easier to access. If you have a Business set up on Google, Posts are right there in the left-hand column.
For anyone looking to use Posts with Google* to get the feed type page similar to Man City…take a gander at my surprisingly bland how to here…
*If you want the Posts with Google, as we have, you need to request access via https://posts.withgoogle.com/.
Comments and likes, as always appreciated!
