What You Need To Know About Google AMP

By now, as a marketer you should know how important mobile marketing is for the success of your brand.

Mobile is set to soon outpace desktop use for search and web consumption, and Google has placed a premium on sites with mobile friendly designs in search results. If you haven’t already created a responsive design for your site, started running mobile ads, or even created a dedicated mobile app for your brand, you need to get to work.

Now Google has made it even easier for publishers to reach mobile customers with the introduction of Google AMP, or its accelerated mobile pages project. Here’s what you need to know about AMP and how it will affect your marketing strategy:

How It Works

With Google accelerated mobile pages, your content will show up much the same way they do on your desktop site.

That means that they will appear with video, photos, graphics, animations and other rich content right alongside smart ads. Google has designed the platform so that the pages load quickly, if not instantaneously The pages will also appear consistently across devices, including different types of smart phones and tablets.

Google has used AMP HTML to create this platform, and it allows websites to build light-weight webpages that have the same functionality without the same impact on the server.

Many publishers have been using AMP since it was introduced in October, including major brands like Pinterest, Twitter, and Word Press. Google is encouraging more publishers to use it to make the mobile experience better.

Benefits of AMP for Your Brand

By using Google’s new AMP, you can reach more of your users where they are accessing content: Mobile.

But AMP has more benefits than a simple responsive website. Content on a responsive website still has to load dependent on your host, so if your site is slow, the content will load slowly. With AMP, those same pages will appear almost instantly. Google aggressively caches the content so that it does not have to load from scratch each time a user accesses it.

Thanks to this setup, you will retain more of your readers and lower your bounce rate, which will help everything from the number of visitors you get to your conversions. Your page will also appear higher at the top of Google mobile search results, which will help you get more visitors and more visibility for your brand.

Responsive design doesn’t always display your rich content the way you would like either. With AMP, you can design your pages to look exactly the way you want to on mobile devices. You won’t lose any of the impact that your content makes.

With the control that AMP offers, you can also take greater control over your mobile advertising. You can ensure that the mobile ads appear where you want them so that they get the impact you want and generate the revenue you need.

How to Use Google AMP

Unfortunately, you can’t just sign up for a program and start having your content published through the AMP platform.

You have to actually take control of creating and publishing this content yourself in the proper format. Google uses a special subset of HTML that includes specific JavaScript components.

You will have to learn how to create content using this code, and then you publish it directly through the platform. Extensive tutorials are now available on how to create AMP pages with this special markup language, including how to add images and other media to the content.

The formatting may seem a little intimidating if you are used to creating content in WordPress or another user-friendly content management system. However, the tutorials make it easy for you to understand, and you can simply follow the templates provided until you get a better feel for how to customize your content.

The more pages you publish in AMP, the larger the presence you can create with mobile users and the more traffic you can drive to your site.

Google also includes automatic placement of analytics into these pages, so you can easily follow their performance and find out how much of an impact the platform is having on your overall web presence.

You can use these analytics to conduct A/B testing between your AMP pages and pages that are published with the same text content on your desktop website. That data can help you make tweaks that can improve your presence on both platforms. The stronger your content is, the better your opportunities for monetization, as well, which will protect your bottom line.

Google AMP and Facebook instant articles are just two new exciting publishing tools that all marketers should be using. If you haven’t already started using these new tools, it’s time to look into how you can right away. You’ll start connecting with more customers and improve your web presence.

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