Google ads are getting AMPed up with Google Inc.’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology.
AMP is an open-source framework that allows businesses, including retailers and marketers, to build lightweight mobile pages that load nearly instantly on smartphones.
The search engine giant recently announced AMP for Ads and an AMP ad landing page through its DoubleClick unit, which serves ads on the internet.
AMP for ads will allow advertisers to build ads with Google’s fast-loading AMP HTML. For example, if a consumer on a smartphone clicks on a New York Times article in a Google search result that is built with AMP coding, the article and ads within it will load simultaneously at AMP speed, which is almost instantaneously. Likewise, if a consumer clicks on an AMP-built ad, the landing page for that ad will load superfast as well, Google says.
Accelerated mobile pages can load extremely fast because the HTML code contains restrictions, such as not allowing custom Javascript coding. AMP also uses AMP Cache, which is Google’s content delivery network that validates every page and doesn’t depend on external resources, such as recommendations or personalization features powered by e-commerce technology vendors, according to the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project website.
Google introduced AMP in October 2015, and in February the search giant announced that relevant AMP pages would appear in mobile search results. Initially, the project targeted publishers so content-heavy news articles would load faster. The New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed and Vox Media were among the first publishers to use AMP for articles. Online marketplace eBay Inc. is one of the first retail companies to try Google AMP as well.
Retailers and ad agencies should embrace this new open source code, says Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at the business research and advisory firm Altimeter Group.
“Google’s AMP for mobile ads essentially transfers something Google has long valued on the ‘traditional’ web to mobile: Fast-loading ads, which is solidly linked with better customer experience,” Lieb says.
The average mobile site takes 19 second to completely load, according to Google. Early analysis shows mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data, on average, than non-AMP mobile web pages, says Paul Muret, vice president of display, video and analytics at Google, in DoubleClick’s advertiser blog.
“Google can’t charge advertisers for ads consumers don’t see, and with average load time currently almost 20 seconds, that’s a lot of drop-off and abandonment,” Lieb says. She also suggests Google extend the technology to mobile video ads, which are not yet included in AMP.
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