A look at how Google AMP can be used as an audience development tool for mobile traffic
Publishers are constantly looking for new options for an audience development tool that leads to trackable changes.
Today we’re looking at Google AMP as an audience development tool for Condé Nast. This story is coming directly from an article at Condé Nast.
[text_ad]
To begin, let’s look at why Condé Nast decided to use Google AMP. “Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages are a set of performance focused restrictions and limitations on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that maximize performance and allow Google to distribute optimized content using their CDN.”
Sound wonky? It is! Although you’d never know from looking at an AMP page, which looks like a stripped down HTML page focusing primarily on text and readability.
The article continues by getting deeper into the reasons whyCondé Nast decided to start publishing digital content with Google AMP. “AMP delivers many benefits in terms of performance, consistency, and experience for our mobile users. Users arriving from Google undergo an uninterrupted flow from search into our content. AMP content loads quickly thanks to Google’s CDN and AMP HTML enforced performance guidelines. The AMP Layout System ensures a great reading experience by preventing pages from jumping around as third-party content loads.”
Then there’s the discoverability aspect. It’s important to look at the other aspects of Google AMP as an audience development tool for Condé Nast. According to the article, “AMP increases the visibility and discoverability of our content by allowing it to be included in Google’s Top News Carousel, as well as improving the experience of regular Google search results. AMP ensures our content consistently loads quickly anywhere in the world with a seamless experience from Google search through their integrated AMP viewer. This seamless experience leads to increased engagement and decreased bounce.”
Given how many publishers we know are trying to get into Google News, or listed more prominently, that’s a fun feature to know about.
Condé Nast goes on to share their results so far. “We went live with Google AMP on Vanity Fair a little over a year ago. Post-launch, the traffic and search rank results were very positive: click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.”
Overall, it appears that Google AMP has been a successful audience development tool for Condé Nast so far. For more on Condé Nast’s use of Google AMP, including how the publisher has implemented the tool on its website, visit the reference article.
There are many audience development tools in today’s digital publishing environment. Do you need help deciding on the best ones to use, or help with structuring your audience development strategy in general? If so, set up a time to chat with us. We have extensive experience helping digital publishers build digital audiences that last.
