Should you AMP-lify your site in 2018?
This is a question on the mind of many publishers. To help answer it, this post is going to dive into case studies and examples showing results different companies had with AMP.
If you’re not familiar with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), it’s an open-source project aimed at allowing mobile website content to render nearly instantly. This initiative that has Google as a sponsor, but it is not a program owned by Google, and it’s also supported by Bing, Baidu, Twitter, Pinterest, and many other parties.
Some initial background
Since its inception in 2015, AMP has come a long way. When it first hit the scene, AMP was laser-focused on media sites. The reason those types of publishers wanted to participate in AMP was clear: It would make their mobile sites much faster, AND Google was offering a great deal of incremental exposure in Google Search through the “Top Stories news carousel.”
Basically, you can only get in the Top Stories carousel on a mobile device if your page is implemented in AMP, and that made AMP a big deal for news sites. But if you’re not a news site, what’s in it for you? Simple: providing a better user experience online can lead to more positive website metrics and revenue.
We know that fast-loading websites are better for the user. But what you may not be aware of is how speed can impact the bottom line. Google-sponsored research shows that AMP leads to an average of a 2X increase in time spent on page (details can be seen here). The data also shows e-commerce sites experience an average 20 percent increase in sales conversions compared to non-AMP web pages.
Stepping outside the world of AMP for a moment, data from Amazon, Walmart, and Yahoo show a compelling impact of page load time on metrics like traffic, conversion and sales:
You can see that for Amazon, a mere one-tenth of a second increase in page load time (so one-tenth of a second slower) would drive a $1.3 billion drop in sales. So, page speed can have a direct impact on revenue. That should count for something.
What do users say about AMP? 9to5Google.com recently conducted a poll where they asked users: “Are you more inclined to click on an AMP link than a regular one?” The majority of people (51.14 percent) said yes to that question. Here are the detailed results:
This poll suggests that even for non-news sites, there is a very compelling reason to do AMP for SEO. Not because it increases your rankings, per se, but because you may get more click-throughs (more traffic) from the organic search results. Getting more traffic from organic search, after all, is the goal of SEO. In addition, you’re likely to get more time on site and more conversions.
How the actual implementation of AMP impacts your results
Before adopting any new technology, you need understand what you’re getting into.
At Stone Temple Consulting, we performed a research study that included 10 different types of websites that adopted AMP to see what results they had and what challenges they ran into. (Go here to see more details from the study.)
Let’s get right to the results. One site, Thrillist, converted 90 percent of their web pages over a four-week period of time. They saw a 70 percent lift in organic search traffic to their site — 50 percent of that growth came from AMP.
One anonymous participant in the study, another large media publisher, converted 95 percent of their web pages to AMP, and once again the development effort as approximately four weeks long. They saw a 67 percent lift in organic search traffic on one of their sites, and a 30% lift on another site.
So, media sites do well, but we knew that would be the case. What about e-commerce sites? Consider the case of Myntra, a company that is the largest fashion retailer in India. Their implementation took about 11 days of effort.
This implementation covered all of their main landing pages from Google, covering between 85% and 90% of their organic search traffic. For their remaining pages (such as the individual product pages) they implemented a Progressive Web App, which helps those pages perform better as well. They saw a 40% reduction in bounce rate on their pages, as well as a lift in their overall e-commerce results. You can see detailed results here.
Then there is the case of Event Tickets Center. They implemented 99.9% of their pages in AMP, and opted to create an AMP-immersive experience. Page load times on their site dropped from five to six seconds to one second.
They saw improvements in user engagement metrics, with a drop in bounce rate of 10%, an increase in pages per session of 6%, and session duration of 13%. But, the stunning stat is that they report a whopping 100% increase in e-commerce conversions. You can see the full case study here.
But it’s not always the case that AMP adopters will see a huge lift in results. When that’s not the case, there’s likely one culprit: not taking the time to implement AMP thoroughly. A big key to AMP is not to simply use a plugin, set it, and forget it.
To get good results, you’ll need to invest the time to make the AMP version of your pages substantially similar (if not identical) to your normal responsive mobile pages, and with today’s AMP, for the majority of publishers, that is absolutely possible to do. In addition to this being critical to the performance of AMP pages, on November 16, 2017, Google announced that they will exclude pages from the AMP carousel if the content on your AMP page is not substantially similar to that of your mobile responsive page.
This typically means creating brand-new templates for the major landing pages of your site, or if you are using a plugin, using their custom styling options (most of them allow this). If you’re going to take on AMP, it’s imperative that you take the time to get this right.
From our research, you can see in the slide below the results from the 10 sites that adopted AMP. Eight of those sites are colored in green, and those are the sites that saw strong results from their AMP implementation.
Then there are two listed in yellow. Those are the sites that have not yet seen good results. In both of those cases, there were implementation problems. One of the sites (the Lead Gen site above) launched pages with a broken hamburger menu, and a UI that was not up to par with the responsive mobile pages, and their metrics are weak.
We’ve been working with them to fix that and their metrics are steadily improving. The first round of fixes brought the user engagement metrics much closer to that of the mobile responsive pages, but there is still more work to do.
The other site (the retail site in yellow above) launched AMP pages without their normal faceted navigation, and also without a main menu, saw really bad results, and pulled it back down. They're working on a better AMP implementation now, and hope to relaunch soon.
So, when you think about implementing AMP, you have to go all the way with it and invest the time to do a complete job. That will make it harder, for sure, but that’s OK — you’ll be far better off in the end.
How we did it at Stone Temple (and what we found)
Here at Stone Temple Consulting, we experimented with AMP ourselves, using an AMP plugin versus a hand-coded AMP web page. I’ll share the results of that next.
Experiment No. 1: WordPress AMP plugin
Our site is on WordPress, and there are plugins that make the task of doing AMP easier if you have a WordPress site — however, that doesn’t mean install the plugin, turn it on, and you’re done.
Below you can see a comparison of the standard StoneTemple.com mobile page on the left contrasted with the default StoneTemple.com page that comes out of the AMP plugin that we used on the site called AMP by Automatic.
You’ll see that the look and feel is dramatically different between the two, but to be fair to the plugin, we did what I just said you shouldn’t do. We turned it on, did no customization, and thought we were done.
As a result, there’s no hamburger menu. The logo is gone. It turns out that by default, the link at the top (“Stone Temple”) goes to StoneTemple.com/amp, but there’s no page for that, so it returns a 404 error, and the list of problems goes on. As noted, we had not used the customization options available in the plugin, which can be used to rectify most (if not all) of these problems, and the pages can be customized to look a lot better. As part of an ongoing project, we’re working on that.
It’s a lot faster, yes… but is it a better user experience? Looking at the data, we can see the impact of this broken implementation of AMP. The metrics are not good.
Looking at the middle line highlighted in orange, you’ll see the standard mobile page metrics. On the top line, you’ll see the AMP page metrics — and they’re all worse: higher bounce rate, fewer pages per session, and lower average session time.
Looking back to the image of the two web pages, you can see why. We were offering an inferior user interface because we weren’t giving the user any opportunities to interact. Therefore, we got predictable results.
Experiment No. 2: Hand-coded AMP web page
One of the common myths about AMP is that an AMP page needs to be a stripped-down version of your site to succeed. To explore whether or not that was true, we took the time at Stone Temple Consulting to hand-code a version of one of our article pages for AMP. Here is a look at how that came out:
As you can see from the screenshots above, we created a version of the page that looked nearly identical to the original. We also added a bit of extra functionality with a toggle sidebar feature. With that, we felt we made something that had even better usability than the original page.
The result of these changes? The engagement metrics for the AMP pages on StoneTemple.com went up dramatically. For the record, here are our metrics including the handcrafted AMP pages:
As you can see, the metrics have improved dramatically. We still have more that we can do with the handcrafted page as well, and we believe we can get these metrics to be better than that of the standard mobile responsive page. At this point in time, total effort on the handcrafted page template was about 40 hours.
Note: We do believe that we can get engagement on the AMP by Automatic plugin version to go way up, too. One of the reasons we did the hand-coded version was to get hands-on experience with AMP coding. We’re working on a better custom implementation of the AMP by Automatic pages in parallel.
Bonus challenge: AMP analytics
Aside from the actual implementation of AMP, there is a second major issue to be concerned about if you want to be successful: the tracking. The default tracking in Google Analytics for AMP pages is broken, and you’ll need to patch it.
Just to explain what the issue is, let’s look at the following illustration:
The way AMP works (and one of the things that helps with speeding up your web pages) is that your content is served out of a cache on Google. When a user clicks on the AMP link in the search results, that page lives in Google’s cache (on Google.com). That’s the web page that gets sent to the user.
The problem occurs when a user is viewing your web page on Google’s cache, and then clicks on a link within that page (say, to the home page of your site). This action means they leave the Google.com page and get the next page delivered from your server (in the example above, I’m using the StoneTemple.com server.)
From a web analytics point of view, those are two different websites. The analytics for StoneTemple.com is going to view that person who clicked on the AMP page in the Google cache as a visitor from a third-party website, and not a visitor from search. In other words, the analytics for StoneTemple.com won’t record it as a continuation of the same session; it’ll be tracked as a new session.
You can (and should) set up analytics for your AMP pages (the ones running on Google.com), but those are normally going to run as a separate set of analytics. Nearly every action on your pages in the Google cache will result in the user leaving the Google cache, and that will be seen as leaving the site that the AMP analytics is tracking. The result is that in the analytics for your AMP pages running on Google.com:
- Your pages per session will be about one
- Bounce rate will be very high (greater than 90 percent)
- Session times will be very short
Then, for the AMP analytics on your domain, your number of visitors will not reflect any of the people who arrive on an AMP page first, and will only include those who view a second page on the site (on your main domain). If you try fixing this by adding your AMP analytics visit count to your main site analytics count, you’ll be double counting people that click through from one to the other.
There is a fix for this, and it’s referred to as “session stitching.” This is a really important fix to implement, and Google has provided it by creating an API that allows you to share the client ID information from AMP analytics with your regular website analytics. As a result, the analytics can piece together that it’s a continuation of the same session.
For more, you can see how to implement the fix to remedy both basic and advanced metrics tracking in my article on session stitching here.
Wrapping up
AMP can offer some really powerful benefits — improved site speed, better user experience and more revenue — but only for those publishers that take the time to implement the AMP version of their AMP site thoroughly, and also address the tracking issue in analytics so they can see the true results.
Love this! I appreciate that you show also the problems of using AMP without customizing it properly.
I've heard before about the benefits of using AMP but didn't know that it can make your mobile page and the user expereince worst.
It's good to know that in order to implement AMP on a website it is required to take the time to do it perfect.
Thank you
Hi Eric,
Thanks a lot for such an Informative post. Truly AMP has revolutionized the mobile search results and greatly affects the ranking of page(s).
I have recently implemented the Hand-coded AMP page on a website and it's successfully indexed in search results but, unfortunately it's not showing the correct description from the meta tag.
Can you please guide how should be done to show the correct description.
Regards,
Hello Akash,
In WordPress, there is the AMP plugin (by automatic), it is an add-on that adds support for the accelerated mobile pages (AMP) project, among its configuration options is the SEO section, where you can configure the Meta tags, in addition to adding tags Social and Open Graph.
In case of working on a platform other than WordPress, there will also be similar plugins.
I do not know if this contribution will solve your doubt.
Greetings, Manuel Cervilla
Hi Manuel,
Thanks a lot for your reply!
As you suggested about the AMP Plugin, I already use it for all my WordPress sites and it helps a lot. But, unfortunately this time it's a simple Hand-Coded Static HTML Page which is causing the issue.
Thanks again for your contribution.
Kind Regards, Akash Kumar
And does the plugin do the job well or you have to do a lot of manual tasks?
Iin theory it's just installing and that's it.
Our experience with AMP is that then we have to give it a little design and functionalities such as sharing in networks, for example, because otherwise it is very simple and they have little interaction with users.
Thanks!
I have the same problems in the past, even worse I had to forget of AMP because script limitations fo AMP, will break my affiliate business which is based on third party script
Great guide! A new era of mobile web is well underway — thanks, in no small part, to the Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project.
Couldn't agree more.
Hey Eric,
Thanks for the data on MPA.But to implement AMP on a website it takes time.
Publishers are probably the only one's who would get benefited most by AMP. Sites that Produce Content. My question is how would you apply this my client, well what comes to my mind is not making the entire site into AMP.
But I think this might affect conversions negatively. What do you think? Great post though. Cheers!
-Shivangi, Marketing Head, RankWatch
It does take time to implement AMP. In fact, it's critical that you spend that time. The most important pages to convert are your main landing pages. It's true that conversion may suffer some if a user goes from a fast AMP landing page to slower pages, but it will still better than it would have been if you're landing page was really slow.
That's a good point. It's better to have a fast landing page atlhough it goes later to slower pages.
Because the user has a great experience with your landing page he will be engaged already in your content/product, so he will be more patient if the next pages are slow.
If the landing page is slow, the user don't have a great experience and then he is not be so patient for the next pages...
I am totally agree with Eric and Mario....
AMP pages will definitely be helpful in conversions since its all about user experience. and yes it may take time but the result which we will get after proper implementation of AMP would really make a difference in our/client's busines sgrowth.
Thank you for your guidance and reflections on MPA. The truth is that Google is increasingly prioritizing the loading of your website and that AMP makes it easier to do so.
Hi Eric,
Yesterday I was able to read in a Digital Marketing Blog the following about not using AMPs identical to the original page:
As of February 1, 2018, the way the content parity policy is applied will change and Google will penalize MPAs that are not identical to the original page.
The purpose is to ensure that users continue with an excellent experience of content consumption that generates a greater engagement with the content of each publisher.
So we will have to be careful not to be penalized, if we are one of the more than 25 million domains that have adopted this type of format.
Greetings, Manuel Cervilla
agreed!
Great post! Have you analyzed any sites that use HubSpot's out-of-the-box implementation of AMP built into their blogging platform? Curious to see if there are potential implementation issues there.
I do not recommend AMP for brochure type of websites. You can instead improve the performance and host it on a fast server. If the site loads in 800ms then AMP would be a waste of time. I do agree that it makes sense for News type of site
Gran post Eric!
Debemos aprovechar el momento para generar tráfico y ahora es el momento de AMP. Ahora que no todos lo usan, tenemos la oportunidad de posicionar mejor nuestras publicaciones y así obtener más tráfico y más oportunidades de conversión. Dentro de 1, 2 años, quién sabe ... quizás ya no sea efectivo
Thanks Eric, it's good to see the real-world benefits and challenges with AMP.
Unfortunately AMP is now another thing we need to add into a site build process - on top of considering desktop users, a good mobile and tablet experience - and now AMP, which seems to be evolving so isn't a 'set and forget' thing at all.
Speeding up the web is no bad thing though.
Agreed on AMP being ONE more thing to do, and that's a drag. One option to consider is making your entire site AMP (both desktop and mobile). Of course, that comes with a big commitment to learn how to do it, and to exceut it successfully.
Helpful article but does AMP pass SEO value to website? It doesn't send traffic to our website or it is?
Great study. However I feel that if your responsive web page loads in 1 second or thereabout AMP may not be necessary considering that you have to overcome a lot of problems to make the user metrics on par if not better than the standard responsive website.
@Eric, Thank you for the insights shared. We are working on a hand crafted AMP pages for our website using "Automattic" plugin. But we face issues implementing other plugins like ContactForm7, etc. Can you give an advice here, how to tackle such user forms in AMP website. Thank you.
The AMP Automatic plugin still has some challenges, and I currently prefer the AMP for Wordpress plugin, as it allows more customization. Truth be told, some of our AMP pages are actually hand-coded in AMP, rater than using the plugins. Try the Gravity Forms plugin together with AMP for Wordpress, and you may have better luck (we did).
Also, watch the AMP Automatic plugin because Google is helping them with a major update to that.
Hi Eric
thanks for the studies. I have a question about the Myntra study. When I click on your link to the "detailed results" I get nothing more detailed. Maybe the page you were linking to was the wrong one? I am very interested in this study :)
Best Regards
Julian
This is the Myntra case study page: https://www.stonetemple.com/amp-case-study/myntra/. However, it doesn't provide additional metrics. Sorry about that!
thanks anyway :)
Hi Eric
At this point there is still someone who does not work to make web on mobile devices more efficient?
Thanks with this data that MPA offers us. I imagined that the advantage was evident, but of course the results are more spectacular than I expected
Been hearing the word AMP a lot lately and really didn't know what people were talking about. Thanks for the great article. Both enjoyed and learned from it.
I find the technology a little bit to recent to jump in with eyes wide shut (what a great movie by the way...). I started doing AMP only for some of my average content length articles to see the impact on user experience. I feel like AMP pages can be a lot of work that I could spend of content. Also, are we pushing out prospects? I know that I don't click on AMP pages on mobile.
Thanks for posting on this subject. I like to follow closely the AMP news.
I believe that the main factor of positioning today is the loading speed of your website, I still have not implemented AMP since issues of duplicate content arise, I would appreciate a plugin recommendation that does not trouble for wordpress, thanks
So interesting Eric. It is time to take AMP seriously if we want to stay in this business. As you say, is not enough with the default automatic AMP plugin.
Your article Mr. Enge was very analytical and cover both the negatives and the positives of a possible AMP transition.
l don't belive that AMP is usefull and l am against it because, it strips out a website from its share buttons, the opting forms etc that are essential for the marketing and SEO of the website.
There are other ways to improve the website speed instead of using just simple AMP technology.
the AMP does not convince me, however you have made a great article.
Greetings.
Great article! And Zid, I feel the same way. I actually did integrate AMP, but so far I do not feel like it made any difference.
AMP could definitely be icing on the cake. Many clients push back saying, the effort involved is more. Educating the clients and trying to convince them has become the part of the job. Honestly, any effort to make our pages load faster and stand out should be given a serious thought and AMP is definitely one at the top currently.
Thank you. Timely article. Just beginning to research if this is a good fit for our "non-news" site.
Load speed of your web page = better user experience = better search engine positioning.
I want to share my experience, I have updated the PHP 5.6 version to PHP 7.2 of my website, increasing the loading speed, I noticed a slight increase in positioning. Recommended!
Thanks for sharing this precious information to us please keep sharing such type of information and please also share information about best digital marketing agencies in Dubai UAE Thanks