Google’s AMP pages mean visitors spend more time with content

Chartbeat says visitors to web pages that load with Google AMP are spending 35 percent more time with that content on average than with standard mobile web pages.

On average, visitors spend 48.2 seconds with pages found through Google search that load with AMP, compared to 35.6 seconds on average with standard mobile pages found through search.

That means pages that load with accelerated mobile pages software (that’s what AMP stands for) are more valuable to advertisers, because visitors that spend more time with content spend more time scrolling through ads.

“In sum, speed matters more to the consumer than we anticipated, and leads to deeper engagement with content,” a white paper from Chartbeat shared with Recode says. “However, it remains to be seen what the long-term benefits of high-speed platforms are for publishers — and whether the effort and investment required outweighs the results.”

The finding was based on data from 360 of the approximately 60,000 sites that use Chartbeat’s web analytics tools and services. All 360 sites included use AMP.

While the point of data is promising for advertisers, fast pages from publishers don’t directly translate into faster loading ads, which means you can have a page load faster than the ads that appear on it. Google has an initiative within AMP for advertisers to help them bring their ads up to speed.

Here’s some other interesting data mentioned in Chartbeat’s white paper:

• 55 percent of visitors to sites spend less than 15 seconds with content, whether mobile or desktop.
• The median page-load time of a Google AMP page is 1.4 seconds, compared to 5.3 seconds for standard mobile web pages, and less than one-thousandth of a second for Facebook Instant Articles.
• 88 percent​ of Instant Articles load too quickly for Chartbeat to register a load time.
• Of the 360 sites included that use AMP, 97 percent also use Facebook Instant Articles.
• Publishers that use AMP see 16 percent of their mobile traffic come from AMP content, and those using Instant Articles see 14.8 percent of mobile traffic from those articles. In both cases, this is part of an upward trend.

Chartbeat

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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