Not familiar with AMP? (Or FBIA or Apple News format, either?) Not to worry, you’re not alone.
In their ongoing quest for more and more profitable traffic, each of the powerhouse three in the world of the internet – Google, Facebook and Apple, have a slightly different take on how to create an experience that will make a user think, “hey, I should just stay here and read my news on _______________ (insert platform name, lol) all day long”, and then do exactly that.
Facebook has Instant Articles, Apple has News, and Google has AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
The first two rely on RSS to power their displays, and each requires a site specific setup that includes formatting and design elements. We found Apple to be the easier of those two to integrate, and the FB version was pretty much a nightmare, but that’s another article.
The mantra of Format, Analytics, Ads and Access that Google claims is their raison d’etre for AMP hasn’t really appeared to us to look like that, but Mediapost has an article that delves into more detail –
Based on the guidance and feedback of the broader AMP community, we have compiled and are posting the AMP Roadmap on our project site,” explains Galfi. There’s no formal process for the creation of the roadmap, instead consider it a guide, “a non-exhaustive summary of the existing higher-volume, public information sources such as the GitHub issue tracker, mailing list, Slack channel for AMP developers, @amphtml Twitter updates, and others,” he wrote.
It’s worth reading the original article, since the explanations given by Google don’t necessarily make sense for marketers, but we haven’t seen them being asked to run anything at Google for years now anyway.
So far, we have seen an inundation of emails claiming there are errors in our AMP pages (even when we test them in Search Console and they return no errors), and we don’t really see our mobile traffic being served via our AMP pages (they are appended with the /amp/ in order to appear as the user friendly, stripped down version that AMP serves to mobile browsers — which is really nice, BTW) in our stats, and we’re not seeing that many AMP results in the mobile search results as a whole.
We’re taking a wait and see attitude with the whole thing, and will continue to report our findings as we accrue more results, both positive and negative.