What the F*** are AMP Ads?!

Yes, we are blessed with yet another abbreviation in the world of digital advertising. As if the terms CTR, VTR, CPC, CPV, RTB, DSP, and SSP were not enough, we are now seeing the emergence of AMP Ads (it’s been a long time coming).

AMP Ads were promoted by Google way back in 2016 as AMP pages became more prevalent in their quest to speed up the mobile web and improve the browsing experience of millions of mobile users around the world. Huh?

Ok, ok. Yes you want to know what AMP is. Well AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages Project which has been spearheaded by Google for a very long time. If you undertake a news search on Google on your phone, you will probably have an AMP experience. Effectively Google wants to make the mobile web much, much faster because right now it is very, very slow.

So what Ads have to do with AMP?

While Google had worked on their AMP project making mobile pages run much faster, they noticed that banner ads were either slowing down the whole experience or simply not delivering a fast enough experience which meant the ad would often not be seen or mess up delivery.

Along came AMP Ads

So AMP ads are now the most effective way to deliver ads on mobile as they simply run much much faster. A traditionally served ad can take up to 5 seconds to load (far too long) whereas an AMP ad can load in under half a second (very fast).

There are other benefits too:

The Ad is seen – Because the ad loads much faster, a user is more likely to see the ad, and click on it, thus improving performance.

Safe sex – Got your attention, you were falling asleep weren’t you?! Joking. Seriously, because all AMP ads are verified by Google and do not link to any external file sources they cannot contain malware and are much safer to run online.

Run everywhere – These ads also run on desktop as they are HTML5 based. They run literally everywhere, as long as you have an internet connection of course.

Teeny Weeny – The file size of an AMP Ad is very small which uses less resource of a device and only has a single entry point for any ad trackers.

Are there any drawbacks?

AMP Ads are coded in a more simplified way, which means some of the animation options can be limited. Most animations are covered, but if you are looking for complex animations, AMP is not for you.

Any other interesting things?

There are some pretty nifty component options with AMP which include:

• Carousel • Video • Video Parallax • Light Box

So how to get started?

If you are running ads online you should seriously consider developing your ads using AMP Ad code, especially if you are running on mobile. More and more SSPs are able to run AMP ads outside of Google and your ad is guaranteed to run faster and be seen by more people. Next time you plan in your digital creative investigate AMP.

And yes, you guessed it, at AGCS we can code them for you 🙂