Girdy is the head of media technology and this means he tends to view sites, campaigns and other digital tools as media assets.

If you want more people to like your website then make it faster - particularly on mobile.

According to research shared by Google,  40% of shoppers will abandon a retail or travel site if it has not loaded within three seconds.

In fact, the search engine giant is such a strong advocate of this message, that it launched an open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project last year.

News organisations were Google’s initial target for the project, but the company is now working hard to boost the attraction of AMP to all sorts of brands.

So do publishers of all kinds need to be jumping on the AMP bandwagon, or is it just beneficial for the big newspaper brands? 

Rapid loading is just one of the perks of Google’s AMP. The search engine also rewards those sites which use it by qualifying them for prominent positions in search. AMP has been quickly adopted by many of the major news publishers for this very reason.

The fact that the setup helps reduce the impact of ad blockers (by hosting ads on the same server as the content) is also a big lure for an industry that increasingly relies on online advertising income.

However AMP has not been without controversy. For a start, AMP versions of your web pages aren’t even on your website but are hosted by Google’s lightning fast content delivery network (CDN) instead, raising questions over content ownership.

Additionally the rules that help ensure AMP content loads as swiftly as it does, also place wide ranging restrictions on design and technology - for example it doesn't allow render-blocking javascript.

This week, a study from SEMRush looked at over 300 of the top publishers across eight countries and discovered far less than 50% of them had added AMP content to their sites and over 70% had technical errors in the content they had published:

So if newspapers are struggling with implementing AMP, should you adopt it for your site?

Being fast to load is also an advantage for ecommerce sites. At Google Marketing Next this year we were reminded that conversions can drop by up to 20% for every one second of page load delay:

Google Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick Announcements Keynote

In addition, AdWords, Google’s PPC offering, will soon be expanding to cope with AMP landing pages. In their introductory blog post on the rollout, ecommerce is used as the example:

It's a powerful demo as it shows, very quickly, that when a customer knows what they want to buy, they will be more likely to buy from the fast and faff- free option.

There are already some good examples of how AMP is working for a wider range of brands.

Over at State of Digital the technical SEO expert Barry Adams shared some details from an ecommerce client that saw an improvement in conversions after introducing AMP.  Barry admits problems with the case study though - noting that the AMP content was only used for the site’s blog posts because AMP doesn’t yet provide the full functionality required for ecommerce - and that the average order value dropped.

Another examination of the value of AMP pages comes from Seven League’s Daniel Ayers who looks at the performance of the Newcastle United website. They had a new kit to launch and here AMP played a vital role helping to improve clickthroughs (CTR). Seven League conclude that mobile search should be a key source of traffic for football sites and that failure to adopt AMP will make that challenging.

In the Middle East and Asia Pacific the travel comparison site Wego.com used AMP for some specific customer searches, terms like ‘cheap flights to Hong Kong’, and reduced page loading times from 11 seconds to less than one. The results were dramatic, with conversion rates to partner sites soaring by 95% and search-to-conversion rates going up by nearly 50%.

Ultimately, AMP should be on the consideration list of any brand paying attention to digital transformation.

Right now, AMP is worth doing for the immediate wins it will bring publishers across all brands, but there are still some limitations. And it also needs to be considered in relation to all the other challenges digitally savvy brands are addressing today - and in most cases AMP will not be priority.

Therefore, the platform has secured its place on the to-do list but is unlikely to be at the top for most.

Meanwhile, Google will be working hard to push their mobile program up that list. And we'll be keeping a close eye on how the project develops so we can advise our clients on whether it's right for them.

News sites are struggling with AMP. Can your brand do better?

Google's AMP has many benefits for brands - but may not have been implemented properly by news publishers.

Google has revealed it will change its famously empty homepage. The company plans to add in a feed to show news stories, videos and algorithmically determined highlights.

This is despite the fact that the clutter-free homepage is one of the iconic aspects of the Google brand, which helped it rapidly become the world’s most popular search engine.

What does it mean for users and advertisers? 
If successful the new homepage style could change how Google’s billions of users experience search. The platform will try and predict what people might be interested in and suggest that before any search happens. Such a significant change in how people use Google will influence brands’ search marketing strategies.

Google will certainly not be the first to try this technique. Rival search engine Bing already shows news stories in a strip across the bottom of its homepage, and Facebook dominates the newsfeed strategy.

Of course, Facebook’s business is based on allowing brands to inject sponsored content. Google will not say whether it has similar plans, but if so it could be a hugely significant new advertising channel - and potentially merging some of the current functions of Google News and Google+.

What will it look like?
We've imagined what the new Google homepage might look like and, with the help of our Art Director Matt, the end results are below. The first example uses a column approach that Google already favours in its “dialer” homepage variant – popular URLs shown when a new Chrome tab is opened – and by Google+.

Google has been moving heavily into a card design format and it is expected that trend will continue to the revamped homepage. Below are examples of how this might look on tablets such as Apple’s iPad and the Microsoft Surface.

Google Now, now on your desktop? 
This will not be Google’s first attempt at a customised homepage either. The search engine experimented with ‘iGoogle’ until 2013 and allowed brands to build widgets for users to add to their search experience.

However iGoogle has since been superseded by Google Now for smartphones and it is likely the new Google will draw on this. It may even be a desktop evolution of the service.

Google Now shows trending news, news that Google has personalised to individuals, weather, sports and other alerts. It also tracks some deliveries, gives price alerts, fitness summaries, birthday, events and flight reminders and a host of other predictive suggestions. It is sophisticated enough to know that a search for [car insurance] does not necessarily indicate an interest in the finance industry whereas a search for [Avengers: Infinity War] is more likely to suggest an interest in the movie.

Popping the filter bubble 
The search engine is promising to show news suggestions from a wide range of sources as to avoid concerns about the ‘filter bubble’ effect in which people only get their news from organisations that support their point of view. This may frustrate supporters of campaigns like Hope Not Hate who are already campaigning to give people the ability to entirely block extremist publications from Google News.

We’re very excited to see how Google implement this huge change to their homepage’s UX and what the reaction is from their users.

Big thanks to Matt for his art direction.

Is this what the new Google will look like?

With Google planning to change its famously empty homepage, we muse over what the future of search might look like and what it means for SEO.

Andrew Girdwood

Head of Media Technology

News sites are struggling with AMP. Can your brand do better?

Is this what the new Google will look like?

Cheltenham

Edinburgh

London