Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): one year on – stats and infographic

We’ve written an awful lot about Google’s open source accelerated mobile pages project (better know as Google AMP) over that last 12 months.

AMPs implications are far reaching, for marketers, for publishers  (big and small) and for ecommerce.

Implementing faster mobile web pages mainly benefits users, who are increasingly frustrated with slow loading times. The latest Google research shows that 53% of people will leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less.

But AMP will soon be a key battleground in search, as AMP listings are now spreading throughout organic mobile results. Publishers and organisations may find the need for AMP implementation will reach the tipping point early in 2017. And although AMP may not be a ranking factor yet, time will tell.

In order to celebrate AMP’s one year anniversary, David Besbris, VP Google Search, AMP Project Lead at Google has revealed a plethora of stats to convince you of AMP’s success, as well as an infographic republished at the bottom of the page.

The biggest participants so far in the AMP format:

• WordPress — AMP’d up tens of millions of websites in addition to VIP publishers
• Reddit — announced tens of millions of pages in AMP
• Bing — iOS and Android app supports AMP
• Ebay — AMP’d up 15 million product category pages
• Pinterest — Uses AMP for Pins
• Google — Launched AMP in search web results

Results for publishers using AMP:

• Washington Post — 23% increase in mobile search users who return within 7 days
• Slate — 44% increase in monthly unique visitors and a 73% increase in visits per monthly unique visitor
• Gizmodo — 80% of Gizmodo’s traffic from AMP pages is new traffic, 50% increase in impressions
• Wired — 25% increase in click through rates from search results, with CTR on ads in AMP stories up by 63%.
• Relay Media — in the last 30 days alone has converted over 2.5 million AMP pages for publishers like The Daily Dot, Hearst Television and The Miami
  Herald which says mobile users who start with an AMP article spend 10% more time than those who land on regular mobile pages.

Ad performance

A DoubleClick study earlier this year compared ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers.

The results are as follows:

• 80%+ of the publishers realized higher viewability rates
• 90%+ of the publishers drove greater engagement with higher CTRs
• The majority of the publishers saw higher eCPMs (Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)

Of course all the above findings should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they are directly from the Google AMP team. Implementing AMP isn’t as easy as it’s made out to be, and in some cases, AMP is leading to lower CTR.

There’s also no guarantee that Google won’t ditch this format in 12 months time, much the same way it did with authorship. And AMP is ultimately another way of keeping you anchored to yet another Google property.

But hey, here’s a nice infographic to make you forget all your anxieties…