A major part of digital marketing strategy is directed towards Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). Online marketers have been digging into ways to harness the potential of using Google’s new AMP recommendations (Google Accelerated Mobile pages) – since their introduction in February this year. This post details some of the ways we and other digital natives are using Google’s AMP Pages to Optimise Conversion Rates.
Since its launch, the Accelerated Mobile Pages project has created great hype in the Search Engine space. Google are streaming traffic to users via Accelerated Mobile Pages and right now the competition for grabbing that traffic is low. At the same time, there is a lot of confusion among online businesses and webmaster alike on how to implement AMP. Despite its apparent benefits for mobile users to access news and content, many have faced challenges nailing down the benefit AMP pages promise for their online presence.
With the ever increasing number of mobile users – the web needed to be more welcoming to these users whose mobile framework and screen resolution prefer not to chew up out a lot of data to load heavy webpages.
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages answered this by slashing all cosmetics from webpages and replacing them with Accelerated Mobile Pages HTMLs. This reduced the size. To make the page load faster, AMP CDN further caches valid AMP pages for near instantaneous access. Result 85% faster page loads for mobile users. Considering an average mobile user abandons websites if it takes greater than 3 seconds to load (three seconds ).
Google AMP pages are specially for websites that serve content to readers like news or content marketers. Besides news site, if you have a SEO/CRO working hard on your site, then creating AMP page version for it is highly beneficial. Note: Since Accelerated Mobile Pages do not allow form submissions or any complex functions for example that eCommerce pages require – this is not meant for such areas of your site. So an obvious recommendation is a content area like your blogging section.
And considering the anticipation that Google might term Accelerated Mobile Pages versions as Fast as it termed responsive web pages “Mobile Friendly”, it will gain better rankings too.
There are areas in your current blog / article posts that can be used to place relevant in-house ads, feature related products or article links that take users back to non Accelerated Mobile Pages on your domain. Since the relevancy of the user is better through the AMP pathway for mobile, this has high potential for increasing conversion rates on your site.
This will prove beneficial for businesses that are content and sales driven. Businesses that adopt Accelerated Mobile Pages could help to drive mobile abandonment rates down and increase conversions. For some content publisher one of their revenue model is being able use paywalls and subscriptions for generating revenue. The neat and clutter free Accelerated Mobile Pages should boost users interest in their content and increase the rate of subscriptions.
The AMP is an evolving method and is definitely a place where mobile traffic will be directed. The opportunity is now to take advantage of the low competition and knowledge around Accelerated Mobile Pages.