AMP isn’t really amping up your site traffic

Publishers are increasingly adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in an effort to boost traffic to their sites.

A Google-backed project, AMP is designed to improve the mobile experience for users, with fast load times and better-designed user interface (UI) for web content and advertisements.

However, results from a recent study showed that only one-third of publishers actually benefit from a clear traffic boost, aided by AMP.

The study was conducted by Chartbeat, along with American news publication The Daily Beast.

According to the study, there was little to no change in average page views on AMP versus non-AMP content that was published in The Daily Beast.

On a related note, the publication saw a significantly lower revenue for pages in the AMP format.

A separate analysis was performed on other 159 other sites using traffic data before and after implementing AMP. The sites studied include a mix of local and national news publications, sports, and lifestyle content across 10 countries; although a majority of the sites are US based.

While in general, publishers on average saw an increase of around 22 percent, there was a huge variation between publishers.

The high increase in traffic is actually disproportionately distributed, significantly benefitting only 34 percent of publishers. Meanwhile, the majority of publishers see little to no significant changes.

Interestingly, Chartbeat couldn’t find definitive factors that contribute to the significant traffic increase observed in the sites.

Although, the study suggested that a number of factors which may have an effect, including implementation date, overall traffic to the site, the share of search traffic, broad type of content, or quality of implementation.

This isn’t to say AMP doesn’t add any value to publishers. It does provide a faster load time and potential opportunities for new products and features on the site.

However, in terms of revenue generation, Chartbeat claims it is less effective. While it is possible to optimize AMP implementation to improve monetization, it cost more than it’s worth for publishers with a lower revenue.