AMP for Advanced SEOs: SMX Advanced insights

At the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle this year, Ranna Zhou from Google, Scott Sala from iProspect and Paul Shapiro from Catalyst all took deep dives into Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). In today’s post, I’m going to share some of the great information that they provided on the topic.

AMP’s expanding ad coverage

Ranna Zhou, Google product manager for AMP, was the first to speak. She talked about AMP ads. This is an important topic because the monetization of AMP has been one of the big concerns about it from the very beginning. She shared some interesting data about AMP ads.

First up was some market data. There are already more than 2 billion AMP pages that have been implemented across more than 900 domains. More and more companies are coming on board, too. Some new partners include Yahoo Japan, Baidu, Sogou, Tencent Qzone (640 million active monthly users) and Weibo (313 million active monthly users). Zhou also shared one case study, for Ali Express, which reported a 10.5 percent increase in conversions and a 27 percent increase in conversion rate on their site.

She then went on to discuss AMP ads. Google’s display ad network, DoubleClick, reports that 90 percent of the publishers using AMP ads are seeing higher CTR, and 70 percent of them experience higher eCPM with AMP ads over regular ads. Google AdSense has implemented AMP Auto Ads:

AMP has also began to implement support for video ads. You can read more about AMP support for video ads here.

Another key in AMP advertising is crypto-signing and validation. This allows the handshaking to take place to show that an ad response is a valid AMP ad by sending a cryptographic signature for the ad along with the response. In the process, the ad gets validated and signed before serving it.

AMP ads are far more lightweight and faster, and Zhou shared some data to back that up:

She also told us that AMP ads use 80 percent less battery than non-AMP ads. Zhou also shared that native programmatic display advertising provider TripleLift is supporting AMP — and is showing some great results:

There is now the ability to select the AMP version in DoubleClick by simply clicking a radio button. Google is also working with MOAT to offer real-time multiplatform measurement. This will make the results of AMP campaigns easier to measure, allowing marketers to quantify how consumers interact with AMP advertisements.

Creative platform Celtra is also jumping on board with supporting AMP. They are one of many companies making that leap:

Innovation is continuing in the AMP format. Form support is now available with <amp-form>. Here are two examples illustrating that in action:

Last but not least, she spoke about <amp-bind>. Using this, you can add custom interactivity to your pages beyond using AMP’s prebuilt components. It’s a fast way to do that using a safe subset of JavaScript.

Motor Trends case study

Next up was Scott Sala from iProspect. He shared a case study for Motor Trends, based on their launch of AMP in July 2016. They initially launched AMP on half of the site’s content. After about one year, the growth of mobile traffic is outpacing that of the site overall:

1. Organic traffic increase: 85 percent
2. Mobile organic traffic increase: 124 percent

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Eric Enge

Eric Enge is the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric also writes for The Digital Marketing Excellence blog and can be followed on Twitter at @stonetemple.