Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project has a lot of people in the digital space excited… and for good reason too! This open source initiative from Google aims to improve user experience across all devices. It has been created by Google specifically for this purpose and to ensure all content is consistently fast, displays beautifully and that web pages perform well across all devices and distribution platforms.

Website speed matters – here’s why

When people surf the internet these days, they’re expecting faster and faster website speeds. That means that speed has increasingly become an important factor and consumers have become accustomed to high performance websites that load fast. Think back to a time when a website you were browsing through took what seemed like forever to load. What was your next move? It’s highly likely that you became frustrated with the site and went looking for whatever you were seeking elsewhere.

If you’re concerned about your website’s speed, you can use this handy tool to test it out. Any result over 5 seconds is not good news for your site because Google penalises slow sites. Additionally, consumers tend to bounce off slow sites quickly so ultimately, a slow site is capable of impacting your bottom line heavily.

A recent article on Google’s Inside Adwords blog, included the following stats that really drive home the importance of website speed times.

  • 53% of all visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes longer than 3 seconds to load
  • As little as a 1 second delay on a mobile page has the ability to decrease conversions by up to 20%

What Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project means moving forward

Although Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is relatively new, early adopters are already seeing positive results (household names such as eBay, Reddit, Bing and WordPress).

Online publishers who are constantly struggling to gain readers’ attention amid all of the constant noise on the internet provide us with just one example of those benefiting from the AMP Project. Let’s take a look at The Washing Post – they saw an 88% improvement in page load times for its AMP content when compared to its more dated content. In turn, this has helped them to increase 7-day return visits from mobile users by 23%.

The more we look, the more examples we find in relation to how AMP is becoming a game changer in the online space. Initially, Google’s load time for an AMP page from Google Search was under a second – Google has recently announced that these pages are now twice as fast and the results are staggering for the likes of early adopters such as Johnson & Johnson who said:

“Johnson & Johnson has seen great results in testing AMP with our product information pages. For specific pages, we’ve seen page speeds improve by 10x and engagement rates improve by 20%. J&J is looking forward to expanding our application of AMP,” says Paul Ortmayer, Head of Digital Analytics – EMEA, Johnson & Johnson

Why fast page load times are especially important in the digital marketing space

In the digital marketing space, fast page load times are especially important for advertising and marketing content (EDMs, promotional emails and so on). AMP usage has been linked with increased Click Through Rates (CTR) and it goes without saying that increased CTR equates to more customers in the long-term. With more people reading your marketing material, you can expect to see an increase in conversion rates.

AMP can benefit your business, as long as it’s used as part of a Digital Strategy

A good Digital Strategy contributes towards your larger, long-term business goals. When we refer to Digital Strategy, we’re really talking about keeping pace with digital technologies and incorporating them into your business on a daily basis. Doing so ensures you remain competitive, while increasing productivity and working towards targeted endpoints in the online marketplace.

These days, we’re talking more and more about how we can all use digital to help us differentiate our brands from our competitors. AMP is definitely a useful tool in terms of amplifying your point of difference as an enhanced mobile user experience quickly distinguishes your website from other sites that are slower and sluggish. It’s safe to say that websites that aren’t optimised for mobile use are a big turn off for the average consumers these days. All you need to do is think about your time spent online – do you want to wait more than 5 seconds for a page to simply load? Do you go to a site on a desktop computer because the mobile solution doesn’t load properly? Probably not.

The reality is, people are more time poor than ever and we as digital marketers need to adapt to emerging online behaviour and trends. Those who can’t or won’t are likely to be left behind.