Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology helps people build faster-loading pages for all types of sites, ranging from news to recipes to e-commerce. Google has announced that the Google Analytics will offer an enhancement that will give webmasters accurate understanding of how people are engaging with their business across AMP and non-AMP pages of the website. On the impact of these improvements, Google Analytics team says, “This change brings consistency to users across AMP and non-AMP pages served from your domain. It will have the effect of improving user analysis... [...]

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open-source project is aimed at making mobile web pages faster. Implementing it in the mobile-based ad serving, marketers can gain an advantage. According to Search Engine Land’s  Frederick Vallaeys, use of AMP can help marketers improve conversion rates and quality. On how AMP can help AdWords advertisers, Vallaeys says, “AdWords doesn’t favor ads that lead to AMP landing pages, nor do they load them from the AMP cache. But advertisers can still get all the speed advantages from AMP’s cleaner code hygiene. AMP is a web standard,... [...]

Barb Palser says, “The Accelerated Mobile Pages project has some big numbers on the scoreboard: More than 860,000 domains are publishing over 35 million AMPs per week, according to stats shared by Google at a recent AMP developer conference, where the company also announced the expansion of AMP to more than a billion additional users in China and Japan. AMP already represents 7 percent of top US publishers’ web traffic, according to Adobe. As the light, fast-loading mobile format is embraced by leading social platforms, e-commerce sites and content publishers, some digital managers are... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “The big news coming out of Google’s AMP Conf in New York is that the mobile framework is set to roll out to a billion more people in Asia. Chinese search engines Baidu and Sogou are adopting AMP; so is Yahoo Japan. Google’s VP of Search and AMP lead David Besbris gave the morning keynote address and made the announcement. The addition of these Asian search engines will mean a billion more people potentially using AMP. AMP launched in October 2015 and since that time has seen significant publisher and developer adoption. There are hundreds of millions of AMP-enabled... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “If you are using the Google-backed Accelerated Mobile Pages, there appears to be an excellent chance that those AMP pages are not being tracked correctly, if you use Google Analytics. Christian Oliveira, a technical SEO consultant, posted a long, technical explanation of the issues AMP is giving with proper tracking in Google Analytics. Malte Ubi, Google’s technical lead for the AMP project, confirmed the problems and that they have no easy solution, in tweets today. In summary, Oliveira found that: – A unique visitor potentially can be reported as up to four... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “As promised, Google is making a change to how it displays Accelerated Mobile Pages, so that users can easily view and share links that lead directly to publishers’ sites rather than to Google’s copy of the content. Google has been displaying AMP content by effectively making a copy of it and rendering it from its own servers, something that Google says makes AMP both faster and more secure for users. However, this has raised concerns with publishers and some users, who have found the system difficult for reaching content directly on a publisher’s site. The... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Let’s say you create a mobile app. And you get it accepted into Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Now what? There are zillions of apps added to the app stores every week, so your biggest problem is simply getting found. Maybe you could luck out and get featured by the App Store. Or maybe you invest a considerable budget in ads encouraging users to install your app — even though they don’t really know it. Palo Alto, California-based Branch is out this week with a free solution that it believes could dramatically change these choices, by changing how app content... [...]

Barb Palser says, “In case you missed it, Google has launched a new type of AMP rich card carousel in mobile search results — in addition to the Top Stories carousel we’re used to seeing. The new AMP carousels appear in the main mobile results list, showcasing related articles from a single publisher. They started appearing at the end of 2016 without fanfare from Google. Let’s call them “single-source carousels.” Single-source AMP carousels are most likely to appear in results for popular queries, particularly for news stories. A January 15 search for “Kansas City Chiefs News”... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Google has been in and out of the small business (SMB) web creation and hosting business since 2006. Apparently, it’s making a renewed effort at providing a very basic website creation tool to local business owners. SMB survey data vary, but a still-meaningful percentage of SMBs don’t have websites. Mike Blumenthal has played with the tool, which is presented in Google My Business (GMB): It is essentially a super simple single page website builder with very little opportunity for customization or change. Upon access to the Website tab in the GMB, it comes up with... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “Early next year, Google will make it easier for those viewing AMP content in its search results to find and share URLs that lead directly back to publishers, rather than to Google itself. Currently, AMP content — accelerated mobile pages — are loaded differently by Google than regular content. Clicking on regular content generally takes people away from Google and to publishers’ sites. Clicking on AMP content keeps people at Google, with a Google URL appearing for that content. Showing a Google URL can be confusing to those who want to share AMP content and... [...]