What is AMP and why is this word being tossed around more than usual? An AMP is an acronym for “Accelerated Mobile Page” which is essentially a light version of HTML or as we’d like to call it, HTML on a diet. It’s an in essence an HTML page that is designed to be super light and that loads pages much quicker for mobile device users.
For many of us living in a developed country, it is very easy to forget about slow connections and that much of the online world still accesses the Internet on slow 2G connections, rather than 3G, 4G, LTE or WiFi. Powerhouses like Facebook and Google both agree and have been acknowledging that a vast portion of their online traffic is actually mobile driven and that these users are on mobile devices as their primary access to the Internet.
Places like India are a great example of this as their retail e-commerce sales are estimated at 5.3 billion and most of this is done through what we North American’s would consider “slow internet connection”. Their estimated online user are over 100 Million. What does this mean? It means that the web and app developers must cater to this large population as well and take in considering the importance of speed. What most digital marketers do not realize is that as much as Google cares specifically about latency and page speed, they also care about the connection speed as well for their rankings.
Google Web LTE was tested out last year to make websites run faster in countries like India and Indonesia. It is countries like these where there are large populations online, but their connection speed has always been a problem that will benefit from these changes the most. Why ignore such a large population? Especially if they’re spending 5.3 billion online! It is estimated that by the end of 2018 all of India will have broadband cover which translate into over 1 billion online users. Speed will become more and more essential and Google agrees.
AMP PAGE RANKING BEGINS
Google stayed committed to its announcement late last year that will begin their ranking of AMP pages as of Febuary 2016. Their new mission is to provide users access to news articles and search results that take less than 1 or 2 seconds to render. This comes as fabulous news for those us living in a 2G world.
The web speed of a page is important, but so is how optimized your page is as well. Google will now alter mobile search results based off connection speed of the online user’s device. This will help provide results for users by tailoring results to the specific device they are using to search for.
Another bonus is that Google is also trying to make the browser Chrome faster and much lighter for users. This is great news for many of us Android phone users, especially when “heavy” and poorly optimized websites tend to drain the battery of these devices. The newly updated compression method is called Brötli, which promises to compress website files 26% more than previous versions of Chrome.
Over the next few weeks, we continue to do a detailed review of the impacts of Google ever changing search results focusing more on AMP. We will look at why and how these results could become more prominent and impact search results at various different speeds. And lastly, we will focus on the reasoning behind Google’s decision and how this initiative forward by them will impact tracking and attribution for digital marketers in today’s day and in the very near future. This is very exciting news folks!
In the meantime, check out how fast these new AMP pages really are. The results are astonishing at just how fast AMP pages really are! Are you on your mobile device? Click this link and see for yourself! http://g.co/ampdemo