Ads on Accelerated Mobile Pages: Where faster is better

Cross-posted from the AMP Project blog

When the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) team set out to help make mobile experiences great for everybody, the objective wasn’t just to improve a user’s engagement with content. We knew the experience people had with ads was equally important to help publishers fund the great content we all love to read. The AMP team laid out four core principles that would guide the innovation on the AMP ads roadmap and get us to a world where ads are as fast and engaging as the content we value.

• Faster is better
• ‘Beautiful’ matters
• Security is a must
• We’re better together

We recently took a moment to review the progress made and see how ads on AMP are doing. We compared ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers (large corporations and small businesses in different geographic regions) on our programmatic platforms. The preliminary results are encouraging. Compared to non-AMP pages, ads on AMP have led to:

• 80%+ of the publishers realizing higher viewability rates
• 90%+ of the publishers driving greater engagement with higher CTRs
• The majority of the publishers seeing higher eCPMs (Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)

We have also received positive feedback from a number of publishers with varying mobile web advertising business models: 

"So far, AMP has performed well against a number of metrics for advertising effectiveness and revenue. One encouraging stat is that we have seen an increase in viewability of ads within the AMP environment. As the industry moves more towards this as a measurement tool it is important we focus on optimizing for this metric. We are encouraged by the open approach to both publishers and our tech partners and look forward to what’s to come." 

— Noah Szubski, Chief Product Officer, DailyMail and EliteDaily 

 
"It is still very early days, but AMP has performed well to date from both direct and indirect monetization sources. We've been able to extend all of our custom ad products to AMP and have enabled it within our premium ad marketplace, Concert. We see AMP as a perfect intersection of two core tenets of Vox Media - fast mobile web experiences and ads that perform. We are encouraged by all of the metrics and are looking forward to continuing to grow this important channel." 

— Joe Alicata, Vice President of Revenue Products & Operations, Vox Media 

 
“We’ve seen a 90% decrease in page latency, 96% decrease in unfilled impressions, 65% increase in ad engagement and 32% increase in eCPM. Perceived load time improved from approximately 17 seconds to 2-3 seconds.” 

—Conor Beck, Director of political news network TownHall Media

While this makes for a promising start, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with ads in AMP. There’s much work ahead for us and the rest of the industry — including our third party ad tech partners — to make advertising experiences on the mobile web as great as content experiences with AMP. We’re both committed to and excited by that. If you’re curious about what lies ahead for the broader AMP project, check out the AMP roadmap. Here’s a brief snapshot of what we are expecting to launch with ads this quarter and next:

• “Beautiful” matters: Two new formats that are as beautiful as they are engaging.
• Sticky Ads — greater viewability without sacrificing user experience
• Flying Carpet Ad — a large canvas for immersive, fast ad experiences
• AMP ads for AMP pages: Ads that load as fast as the content on AMP

Stay tuned for more details on some of these ads initiatives in coming weeks. Posted by Craig DiNatali
Director, Global Partnerships Google