Google brings expanded AMP support to search and display ads

When Google launched its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project about a year and a half ago, the focus was squarely on speeding up mobile web pages, with a special emphasis on news sites. Over the last few months, both the scope of supported pages and the range of places where Google surfaces AMP pages increased. Now, the company is taking the next step by using the technologies it developed for AMP to also speed up some of its core money-making services.

At an event in San Francisco, Google today announced that AdWords users will now be able to use AMP pages as the landing pages for their ads. In addition, Google said that it is now automatically converting Google Display Network ads into the AMP Ads format when they load on AMP pages to speed up their loading time, too. This feature is now available in beta.

AMP landing pages obviously load significantly faster than standard mobile web pages — typically in less than a second. And the faster those pages load, the higher the chance of converting a user into a customer. Google tested this feature with brands like Johnson & Johnson, eBay and real estate company Toll Brothers. “Johnson & Johnson has seen great results in testing AMP with our product information pages. For specific pages, we’ve seen page speeds improve by 10x and engagement rates improve by 20%,” Paul Ortmayer, Head of Digital Analytics – EMEA for Johnson & Johnson said in today’s announcement. “J&J is looking forward to expanding our application of AMP.”

As for AMP Ads, Google says that they will load up to 5 seconds faster than regular ads, even though they will look exactly the same. Google argues that this ensures that users will actually see these ads and “that the experiences users have with your brand is seamless.”

Earlier this month, at its I/O developer conference, Google announced that its newly optimized Google AMP Cache, together with a number of other speed-ups, allows AMP pages to load almost twice as fast from Google Search than before. The company also used the event to launch enhanced analytics support for AMP.