Top Tips For Implementing AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages

Welcome back to Webcertain TV. I'm Gemma Howerton. Today, I'm joined by Barry Adams from Polemic Digital, and we're going to be talking about AMP. Hi, Barry. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So AMP is a really big topic at the moment. A lot of people are talking about it. A lot of people are implementing it. How important do you think it is as something to be aware of?

Short answer, it depends. I do feel Google is throwing a lot of weight behind it at the moment, but their own roadmap is being delayed a little bit. There's a lot of features they should have had in AMP by now, which aren't in there yet. And that's sort of holding back adoption of AMP by websites that rely on more interactive elements and even shopping elements, e-commerce elements. But I do suspect it's going to be a major player. If you're a news website, you sort of have to have it already. But for other websites like brochure websites, e-commerce websites, I think it will have huge potential, but it really depends on whether or not Google and the open source movement behind it can get that momentum going carrot and stick approach to make it worthwhile for websites to do it.

Yeah.

Right now, Google says there's no preferential treatment of AMP in search results. I don't think that's entirely true because you see that with news articles, the news carousel is exclusively AMP. For non-news websites, it probably is more true, but even then, some of the things I'm seeing is that even just having that little AMP icon, they're starting to get a higher click-through rate. Now, in some scenarios, not all scenarios, they get some conflicting data from different websites. And that higher click-through rate might then result, of course, in more traffic, more sales, that sort of stuff. So I think 2017 is probably going to be a bit of a make-or-break year for AMP, whether or not it's going to really get traction and become a default standard, which is what Google wants, or if it's just going to slowly peter out like so many other initiatives over the years.

And I think it's clear that, you know, like you said, news results are definitely very AMP-focused, and I think most news publishers will definitely already be using that.

Should be.

Oh yeah, exactly, or should be. But certainly, like you say, for e-commerce sites or for lead gen sites or whatever other type of sites there might be, there's a lot of businesses that won't have even started yet. Do you think now is the time to do that, kind of try and get ahead of the game a little bit?

Yeah, I've seen some examples of e-commerce websites and lead gen websites who have implemented it just as a test to see if it has any effect. And we're getting a bit contradictory results. One website that I know of who's implemented it with quite a lot of thought and foresight, they got like a 25% uplift in mobile traffic and mobile sales.

Yeah.

Another one, another e-commerce website that has implemented it, got more mobile traffic, by about 10%, 15%, but less sales. But I suspect that's because the way they implemented it was very bog-standard, and there weren't any strong calls to action at the end of the AMP article, so that there wasn't any incentive for people who read the article to then go on to the main website. and do something with that. So I think it really depends on how you implement it. It's seductive in a way to just tick a box and use a plugin or something and get a boxed-in AMP page out there, but I think that's the wrong thing to do. You really have to look at trying to make it look like an integral part of your website and having those strong calls to action, all those conversion optimization elements in there to make sure that when people do see an AMP result and they click on it, that's not the only time they'll interact with it.

Yeah, there's no point in having it if they then just bounce straight back.

Exactly.

And there's been a lot of— I think there's been some research done to show that once people do go into AMP, generally it's more common that they stay within AMP pages and then go back as opposed to clicking through. So that makes it, I guess, like you say, even more important that you do make it very clear what they should do next and why they should do it.

Exactly. That's the challenge for a lot of news websites as well, who do get a lot of that initial AMP traffic, but then it bounces straight out because people just swipe through the carousel of news stories rather than go on and read related news. So you have to put some effort into your AMP articles and make sure that you have strong related stories links or follow-up links that keep people engaged with your website. And of course, make sure that your subsequent mobile website visit that comes from an AMP page is nearly as fast. You can't have that AMP page load in 1.5 seconds, and then when people click on through, they have to wait 15 seconds for your page to load. That's just a straight click of the back button and off they go.

So it's very much like everything, really. It's not just focusing on, okay, we can get some AMP pages. It's thinking about your whole website, your whole process, And making sure that it all works together.

AMP is not a fix for a bad mobile experience. I think it's an add-on which can have positive effect, but it's not going to replace a good mobile experience, and it should never be interpreted as that.

And then to actually implement it, so you mentioned there that you can just kind of get an out-of-the-box solution and probably fairly easily get something going with AMP, but to customize it and make it work for you, that needs a bit more effort. So what are the kind of How easy is it to implement, and what are the pitfalls, maybe, that you might find?

Because the standard is relatively young and uncomplicated, it's actually really easy to build AMP pages. The trick is to make AMP pages look good and make them interactive in any way, because the standard AMP page is just static HTML with almost no JavaScript and very little CSS. So you are going to have to work within those constraints. But some websites do it really, really well. For example, if you look at the AMP pages that The Guardian publishes for the news website, They're almost indistinguishable from the normal news articles because they put a lot of effort into it and they're really stretching the boundaries of what the platform can do. So it does take a bit of effort to make it look good and make it interactive. The bog-standard approach— I mean, there's a lot of examples. The AMP by Example website gives you templates that you can just fill in and put your own content in and voilà. Wouldn't necessarily be my recommendation because, again, you run into that template problem where people just, you know, don't engage with your content at all because it just looks like a bog-standard article and there's no strong call to action. But like I said, you're very constrained to what you can and cannot do.

Do you think that's something that's likely to change then, if Google, you know, they introduce more to make that possible?

It is a fast-developing standard. If you look at the roadmap and the things they want to do, a lot more interactive elements are going to go in there. There's video already in there, for example, image sliders, although I really wish they didn't put that in. Things like that are part of the standard which allow you a bit more creativity and a bit more leeway in what you can do. But it's still fairly constrained. And anything that would require JavaScript is pretty much out of the question. So you really have to think about what your core functionality is, what you really want that AMP page to do, and focus on that and try to get rid of all the other superfluous stuff.

And obviously for news sites, again, it makes sense. It's your kind of breaking news content. You want to be in there. For other websites, is it something that's rolled out site-wide? Or is it something that you choose very specific which pages you want to target with that? and focus just on them.

Yeah, I don't have— I haven't seen any examples of non-news websites doing it sitewide seeing huge uplifts. I have seen websites that have used AMP for some key landing pages that then have really positive impact. Other websites that use it just for their blog to get more engagement and traction on mobile search for the blog results, again, seeing uplifts in traffic. So it really depends on what you want out of it. I think if you have a really well-optimized mobile experience already, you might not want to go down the AMP route just yet. It really depends on how the search results are evolving. But for websites that, for example, for some technological reasons are really struggling to get that initial mobile experience to be optimized, you could use it as a stopgap measure, never a replacement, as a stopgap measure to at least get some optimized content out there in the short term while you go and do the hard work in the long term.

I think the key point with maybe all of this is just mobile in general. AMP is one part of it, and it's potentially something new and it's something that, as usual, you know, gets a lot of buzz about it, and maybe everybody starts to think, we must have AMP. But actually, it's just the fact that Google is investing more in mobile, the mobile-first index is coming. So really, AMP might be correct for you, it might not, but mobile certainly is, and you should be heavily investing in your mobile experience. Absolutely.

I think what a lot of businesses don't necessarily understand is that we're only about not even halfway through internet adoption worldwide. There's about 3 billion people online at the moment, but another 4 billion who are not online. And most of those people, when they go online, will be on mobile networks that are very shoddy, very slow, on older devices that might not be able to render, you know, high-flying mobile experiences. Which is sort of what Google is thinking with the AMP project anyway.

Yeah.

And why, for example, they host AMP on their own CDN, the AMP cache basically, so that people in Africa, in Southeast Asia who go online using smartphones can get that optimized mobile experience that we are just used to living here in the West with our 4G broadband connections everywhere. So it's worth keeping that in mind if you are beginning to target those sorts of countries, want to go international with your offering, that AMP is a fairly good way of getting that visibility, getting that mobile footprint without having to invest a lot of money into CDNs with nodes in Africa and Southeast Asia and places like that.

So, yeah, ultimately the tip is Be aware of it, investigate how it could work for you, but don't just blindly apply it without really thinking if it's going to make any sense.

Exactly, have a bit of thought about it before you jump into it.

Great, Ross, lots of good tips there. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.