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Only 1 in 3 Publishers Sees a Clear Traffic Boost From Google's AMP (chartbeat.com)
As Google pushes its AMP (accelerated mobile pages) project among publishers, assuring them of the traffic and efficiency gains, a new research finds some shortcomings in that promise. Web analytics service Chartbeat writes: Chartbeat, together with The Daily Beast, collaborated on a two-part research study to rigorously quantify the effect of adopting the Google-backed Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format on publisher traffic. This study is the first formal statistical analysis of the effects of AMP on website traffic. The overall result of this study is a methodology for analysis that we hope will be useful to other data scientists.
Our overarching finding is that AMP boosts traffic for publishers on average, but most publishers are not average. Only 1 in 3 we analyzed could see clear statistical evidence of a traffic increase. Though it may be possible to optimize AMP implementation to improve monetization, publishers seeing lower revenue on the platform will have a hard time making the case that a traffic boost will make up for it.
The first is an A/B test run by The Daily Beast in which, at random, half of newly published articles were published in the AMP format and half were published in the standard format. This test failed to show clear statistical evidence of higher Google-driven page views on the AMP than non-AMP content. Meanwhile The Daily Beast observed clearly lower revenue for the AMP format.
Our overarching finding is that AMP boosts traffic for publishers on average, but most publishers are not average. Only 1 in 3 we analyzed could see clear statistical evidence of a traffic increase. Though it may be possible to optimize AMP implementation to improve monetization, publishers seeing lower revenue on the platform will have a hard time making the case that a traffic boost will make up for it.
The first is an A/B test run by The Daily Beast in which, at random, half of newly published articles were published in the AMP format and half were published in the standard format. This test failed to show clear statistical evidence of higher Google-driven page views on the AMP than non-AMP content. Meanwhile The Daily Beast observed clearly lower revenue for the AMP format.
Many websites abuse AMP with added elements and make it as useless and bloated as their main website.
Also I've seen cases of websites that enable AMP even on their homepages and categories...
Also many publishers use amp as bait to their site, e.g. by having half of the article or page on AMP and the rest in their website.
This is total abuse of it. Google made AMP so as to have a very light version to offer to readers who are on mobile data, and don't need to download a 7MB webpage to read just an article.
That's not how AMP should be configured and used. Websites that don't see increase in traffic are doing many things wrong and their users are just avoiding the AMP versions of the pages.
Google is going to promote it no matter what, but I see that they will punish publishers who take advantage of it.
I don't recall the pitch of AMP being increased traffic, it was to limit webpages to a subset of elements and scripts to provide a good experience to readers. The reason was of course that publishers had crammed their pages so full of garbage they loaded very slowly and content jumped around.
Google also said they would prioritize these sites (but supposedly also non-AMP sites that performed well) in search results. I don't see how this would ever increase traffic to popular sites, not doing it might reduce traffic as they'd be ranked lower. Traditionally Google also had the idea that increased web usage was beneficial to them, I think this is true for publishers also - if users generally have a good experience reading articles on the web they'll be more likely to read more articles.