Google releases a variety of Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) updates: scrolling animations, video analytics, fluid ad support

Yesterday, Google announced several Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), technical updates. These included scrolling animations, an improved responsive-navigation sidebar, support for video analytics, fluid ad support and other features to improve ad targeting.

Here’s a little more color on the list of new capabilities:

• Scrolling animations: enables “parallax effects, subtle zoom or fade-in of images, and starting or stopping animations”
  
• Responsive sidebar: “improvements to amp-sidebar enable changing display format based on the width of the viewport”
  
• Native video analytics support in AMP
• Improved Client ID information to enable consistent ID recognition as users migrate between AMP and non-AMP pages
• Fluid-ad support for publishers: enables publishers to request ads where the ad size is unknown

The post that goes into more technical detail about each of these updates is here.

The open-source AMP project was announced by Google in 2015 to speed up the mobile web. Specifically, AMP was aimed at improving the rendering of content pages on mobile devices. Since that time, AMP has been greatly expanded to include ads and analytics. AMP for Ads (and landing pages) was introduced in mid-2016. Meanwhile, AMP-enabled content pages moved out of the “top stories” section — where news results are displayed — and into main search results in August of 2016.

AMP pages load roughly four times faster and use one-tenth the data of pages and objects not built in AMP, according to Google research. The company also says that AMP-powered mobile display ads load up to five seconds faster than traditional display ads. Many publishers on the DoubleClick exchange reported higher eCPMs on AMP pages as well.

The project is not without controversy, though, regarding the AMP URLs vs. publisher URLs. However, in iOS 11, Apple attempts to remedy that: Safari changes AMP URLs back to publisher URLs when shared.

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