Levis TechTalk: AMP is Magical and You Should Try It Part 2
You may recall our last TechTalk blog, and if you're anything like me, you haven't been able to stop thinking about it. We covered the ins and outs of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). While AMP HTML (used to create website pages) has the widest support and is the most flexible out of all the AMP features, there are a few more subsets of AMP that are useful in their own way and have a lot of potential.
Hold onto your hats because today, we're going to talk about the MAGIC of AMP for advertising and marketing.
I should slip in a disclaimer here that there is in fact no real magic involved here. Apologies for any misunderstanding and have fun with your Ouija Board.
FIRST UP: AMP EMAIL
AMP Email is a stricter and faster coding standard for email, and we know already how much we like things to be fast. Maybe strict, too. However, AMP Email offers a lot of extra functionality. With AMP email you can elevate your direct email marketing campaigns with a wider range of content options, including:
- Forms within emails to easily collect user info or information without linking to an external page. This is fantastic for mobile users that access their email through phones and don't want to get kicked over to a web browser to fill out info.
- Image sliders and carousels to spice up your content. You could have have an interactive photo gallery of your top products right in an email!
- Lightboxes that open on a click but once again don't take the user to another app or browser tab.
- Accordions for opening up hidden information. Accordions are a user experience design lifesaver when you have lots to say but low attention spans. Now you can take it your email marketing content, too.
- Dynamic content just like a website. You can click through on links to different pages and different content. Magic! Websites right inside an email!
- Ecommerce carts to make purchases in your email. With AMP Emails, you can offer a complete checkout option within and email. Users abandon their cart? Send them an AMP Email and you can entice them to make the purchase right there and then without going back to the website.
There's a catch....
This sort of functionality requires Javascript which typically isn’t allowed by mail clients. Unlike AMP HTML which has mostly universal support, AMP Email is a lot newer and is restricted to Gmail, Outlook, mail.ru and a handful of other lesser used protocols. That being said, there are some big players are getting on board with AMP, including Pinterst, Doodle, Oracle and LendingTree. And of course they are - simplifying content accessibility and online purchasing has enormous potential.
NOW THAT YOU'RE HOOKED: AMP ADS
Next up is AMP Ads. Everyone loves ads right? Well, love them or hate them the Big G’ makes most of their money from online advertising, so it was only natural that they throw in an AMP ad component. Using the strict AMP standard, you can put AMP ads on your website so that they load faster, thus increasing clicks and revenue. One of the reasons I know that I dislike ads on websites is that they load more slowly than the content, frustrating you as you try scroll through. Stop that madness with some AMP magic.
If you are interested in changing the ads on your website to AMP Ads but your development skills aren’t up to par there are a wide variety of tools available that will do this for you. Adobe Editor and Google Web Designer will both create interactive AMP Ads for you that you can easily embed on your website.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST: AMP WEB STORIES
"Web Stories" is AMP targeting content publishers, particularly with a focus on mobile. While Web stories aren’t really different from regular AMP outside of using a specific AMP HTML tag (amp-story), Google tries to make it easy for content creators reap the benefits of AMP by providing tools and templates to easily create your own Web Story. By simplifying content creation, creators can go on to create better, faster, more accessible content for Google to send searchers towards. Why do that? Because Google is addicted to speed, and knows that users are, too. Google wants to send Googlers (that's us) to content that loads quickly and efficiently.
While Web Stories are great for making visually appealing articles, they won’t do you much good unless search engines are able to find them and easily figure out what they’re about, (Structured Data), and make them easy to share using social media (Open Graph).
What's Open Graph you ask? Stay tuned! We've got more for TechTalk on both these features. Oh you didn't ask? Oh well, you're going to find out anyway!
Amped to get AMP?
If you are interested in enhancing your online presence and you don’t have AMP, where is a good place to start?
Things to consider….
- If you website is slow to begin with or has poor UX, you should probably address that first. You will get better results by making sure your default mobile site is optimized before focusing on AMP.
- You don’t need to make your whole website AMP. Having shareable content such as blog posts, news and products is the important thing.
- Make sure your AMP experience is well connected to the non-AMP experience. Your amp branding and styling should match what’s on your mail site.
- Email an expert....
Thanks again to XKCD for being amazing! Permalink to our cover image here.