Can your business increase revenue and conversion rate using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?

Published in

outl1ne

5 min readSep 27, 2018

What is AMP and will it help your business?

AMP (accelerated mobile pages) is a Google open source initiative to provide faster mobile web browsing experience. What it essentially means is that when you go to search for something on your mobile phone like shoes, match results for your favourite sports team or a new robot vacuum on Google you will be able to see initial content within less than 1 second median time after the first touch. In general throughout all industries for mobile devices these loading times average somewhere around 10 seconds so in many cases this means 10 times faster loading times.

Under the hood website developer is instructed to create the AMP page using special rules and limitations which would make the website loading as optimal as possible. This means less fancy things in favour of delivering necessary content to your consumer faster. Usually these sites would be content duplicated from your normal website so you’d still be able to provide rich desktop experience — even though your general website should be optimised reasonably as well.

AMP was announced by Google in the late 2015 and first implementations were available in the autumn of 2016.

How much does site loading speed affect your conversion rate?

Here’s a table to illustrate lost revenue depending on your sites initial loading time. Revenue is chosen for example purposes.

This information is gathered from compiled case studies including published data by Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, Walmart and others available here:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page-load-time-conversion-rates

Results will vary depending on industry and business.

According to google median time for any AMP site accessed from google is less than 1 second.

So depending on your profits incoming from mobile traffic through Google search you can reasonably estimate how much it would be worth for your business to increase your homepage loading speed to any of those targets.

Increased conversion is not the only benefit as Google might favour AMP supported pages and increase their visibility in search results.

If AMP is so good are there any large corporations investing in it?

AMP is mostly recommended for news and e-commerce sites. There’s for example eBay, Washington Post, Reddit, Yahoo, The Guardian, CNBC and Wired and many more who are supporting AMP. You can recognise anyone using AMP when you search through mobile and there’s a small lightning icon displayed on the result box.

Try it out and click the result — you will definitely notice the speed.

https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/

How does AMP compare to other generic site optimisations?

Other site optimisations are usually done to a site which supports both desktop and mobile platforms. This means even if all the required resources for the website are minimised they are often still over bloated with website styling and javascript code. On mobile device you are still pulling in resources which might be used only on your desktop. It’s harder to achieve the same results trying to optimise an existing website compared to creating an AMP site. It also helps that google caches the site and delivers the site by themselves using a content delivery network meaning your users will get the resources necessary from a nearby location. In general there’s less to worry about following the best practices using this approach.

How to implement AMP as a developer?

To get started with AMP I suggest reading getting started tutorial on AMP’s info page here:

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/getting_started/create

In general this includes writing your html page using special amp-tags, inlining CSS styles, adding some meta data to it and following all the optimization rules pointed out. After which you should validate your site using chrome dev tools. All the details necessary are available in the link above. It should start working out of the box as long as your sitemap is configured correctly and Google crawler has access to that URL. It might take some time of course for Google to crawl it.

How to implement AMP as a business owner?

Depending on your business and goals the easiness of implementing AMP can vary.

You’d need to consider which pages you are going to “amplify”. Some might require custom logic for example when you wish your user to be able to query something or add products to cart. These are exceptionally harder to amplify compared to your usual static content. For an e-commerce site it would be wisest to start from list pages which could direct to your normal site after first tap on a product.

For a news site you might want to amplify news articles and general category pages such as “Sports”, “Funny”, “Cat gifs” and so on. As probably a lot of your revenue is from ads, you might need to think how these can be implemented on an AMP page — it’s definitely possible. More info about it is available here https://www.ampproject.org/docs/ads/amphtml_ads

Definitely should start working from pages for which you know you usually get most traffic from Google.

What else can I do to increase reveue?

There are options starting from optimising your existing website’s loading speed and search engine visibility to creating a PWA (progressive web app).

These apps are designed to work offline — even if a mobile user loses internet connection during a train ride in tunnel she will still be able to navigate around meaning more time spent on your site and increased chance of conversion later when the internet comes back on. PWAs are able to download necessary data to phone and reuse them in a smart way. Usual sites wouldn’t preload necessary content from another possible site user might navigate to or neither they won’t save the old content so you can come back to it without having to load the data all over again.

PWAs compared to AMP mean faster loading times after the initial load. These in combination can be very powerful to create a smooth user experience for a mobile user.

Here’s a great site which has curated many user stories of implementing a PWA: https://www.pwastats.com/

Conclusion

If you have a blog, a news site or an e-commerce site, it’s definitely worth to check it out and figure out how it could increase your mobile traffic based on data from similar businesses to yours.