We Bust 4 Myths About Google AMP | SEO
Some major publishers and eCommerce sites gave up early on AMP because of its limitations at the time.
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Stone Temple’s Eric Enge busts four persistent myths about AMP that shouldn’t keep you from taking advantage of its incredible speed for mobile page delivery.
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Resources
- See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
- 4 AMP Misconceptions That Are No Longer True
- The Argument for AMP (includes brand case studies)
- AMP Tech Guide
Transcript
Mark: Eric, you’ve been investing a lot of time into keeping up with the latest developments in Google‘s AMP program, but first off briefly explain what AMP is.
Eric: AMP, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a program that was originally sponsored by Google but now is an open-source program with a lot of different participants. AMP uses a simplified version of coding pages, and participants in the program can also cache those pages on their own servers. The end result is that users end up with web pages that load lightning fast on their mobile devices.
Mark: And one of the things you’ve found is that despite huge changes in updates to AMP, several myths about it persist. Now what are some things that might have been true about AMP at one time but no longer are?
Eric: The first myth is that AMP doesn’t support very many ad platforms. It’s true that in the beginning there were some pretty significant limitations in AMP that kept out some networks and ad formats, but now a great many more ad platforms support AMP. There are now work-arounds for things like interactive ads, such as serving them up in an amp-iframe.
Mark: So what’s another myth you can bust?
Eric: Well, early on many people noticed that it was hard to get accurate analytics for AMP, largely because someone viewing AMP content was getting it from the Google server on the google.com domain. And if they clicked a link in the content, that took them to a page on your actual site.
So it would be a change in domain and therefore the analytics would attribute that as a third party referral, rather than as coming from an organic search where the person actually found it. There’s now a fix for this in Google Analytics using a technique called Session Stitching. You can find a link to instructions for implementing that in the article I wrote.
Mark: So what about interactive content?
Eric: That’s another area where AMP used to have severe limitations. One big problem area that caused was for eCommerce sites that depend on faceted navigation. However, today AMP has several built-in components like amp-bind, for example, that make interactive faceted navigation really quite possible to implement.
Mark: And the final AMP myth to bust?
Eric: Ah, many felt that AMP offered an inferior user interface and experience. In fact, they referred to the pages as being stripped down. Because AMP is so simplified in order to increase speed, it didn’t have the flexibility to format pages in a way that had all the features and look and feel of the site’s responsive mobile pages normally.
However, here at Stone Temple, we proved it’s possible to create custom AMP pages that look just like our great mobile responsive pages, yet retain the lightning fast speed that AMP is known for. It took some coding to create a tool that would scrape our WordPress pages and render them in validated AMP code, but the result was well worth it.
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