Back in February, Google began displaying Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in search results. Google introduced AMP pages following the success of Facebook’s Instant Pages, which brought Facebook users across different pages with very little wait times. The major aim for AMPs was to bring mobile users to news articles across the web with virtually zero load time, however, Google has begun integrating it into a number of different applications in recent months, including the Google News App on iOS.
While Accelerated Mobile Pages may genuinely improve the user experience, Google monetizes AMPs by integrating ads into the pages. To this point, Google only supports basic ad formats for their AMP pages. However, on June 7th, Google’s AMP team announced their plans to integrate 3 new types of ads into AMP pages. These new types of ads are as follows:
Sticky Ads
Sticky Ads are often seen on the top or bottom of pages. These ads are generally not very obstructive to users as they don’t affect the user experience too greatly
AMP Ads for AMP Pages
These ads will be using the same AMP HTML as the actual AMP content on the site, guaranteeing that the ad and the content will load at essentially the same time.
Flying Carpet Ad
While Google describes these ads as “a large canvas for immersive, fast ad experiences”, TechCrunch asserts that they’re “one of the most annoying new ad types.” Flying Carpet Ads overpower the content on the site and even takes control of the scrolling function, making it so that users who try and scroll past the ad will only be greeted with more ad space.
Users may begin feeling less enthusiastic about AMP pages once these new ads are introduced, but web publishers couldn’t be more excited about AMP pages. Google claims that 80% of publishers have experienced a higher viewability rate, while 90% have noticed a higher click-through-rate.
Google looks to really build upon the Analytics capabilities of AMP pages in the future. With AMP pages still being new to the internet landscape, we can expect frequent changes in the road ahead.