What is Google AMP and How Can You Leverage It?

Google AMP is a website publishing technology that enables fast loading on mobile, hence the acronym, AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Mobile is the future, driving more traffic, leads, and conversions than desktop. The problem, however, is that many legacy websites are built on older systems. Therefore, they perform poorly on mobile devices. From slow loading times to unresponsive displays, a site that is not mobile-ready can cost a business a lot in missed revenue.

With this in mind, mobile conversion rate optimization is now a hot topic, as more companies want to know how to maximize their gains with mobile traffic. In this article, we’ll explore the Google AMP project, and give the information you need to optimize your website and increase your mobile conversion rates.

What is Mobile Conversion Rate Optimization?

A conversion is whenever a prospect completes an action on your site that you have defined as valuable to your business. For example, they might complete a form, download your eBook, sign-up for your email newsletter, or purchase a product.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the practice of improving your marketing funnel and website user experience, so more visitors convert. By extension, mobile CRO is all about increasing your conversion rates for users that view your website pages on mobile devices.

With M-commerce on the rise, and mobile search now accounting for more traffic, businesses must get serious about mobile CRO.

The Importance of Mobile in 2020 and Beyond

If the mobile version of your site has a lower conversion rate than its desktop equivalent, you are missing out on the benefits of Google AMP.

Take a look at how mobile is on the rise around the world:

UK: Time spent on Mobile vs. Desktop:

 

 

USA: Time spent on Mobile vs. Desktop:

 

 

ASIA: Market Share comparing Mobile vs. Desktop:

 

 

The Importance of Speed on Mobile

53% of mobile users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Speed really matters!

Furthermore, research shows that reducing your load time from 15 seconds to 2 seconds can drive a 30% increase in conversion rates.

 
The UX on your mobile website can make or break your mobile CRO. Here are some techniques to improve your mobile UX:

1. Make Speed a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) – Set specific targets for your page loading times to make it central to your business goals, which will ensure you continue to improve it on all pages.
2. Set a performance budget – Challenge your creative team to limit pages to 1MB. With lightweight pages, your site will perform better.
3. Optimize code – Developers need time and technology to fix speed issues. Embrace Google AMP best practices to enhance your site.
4. Use a strong, clear call-to-action (CTA), like “share now” or “sign up today” to guide prospects through your funnel towards the point of conversion.
5. Scale your mobile web pages for both landscape and portrait views.
6. Use buttons instead of linked text to make it easier for users to click.
7. Include a search bar feature at the top of all web pages to make your website easy to navigate.
8. Place critical info above-the-fold on all pages, so it’s not lost.
9. Add one-click sharing options that include all major social media platforms.
10. Provide instant email sharing options if your content is too extensive to read on mobile.
11. Optimize images – Review your design and decide if all images are essential. As for the ones you keep, do the following:

 

• Compress all image files to minimize file size.
• Use lazy loading so images at the top of the page load first, and the rest load as the user scrolls.
• Avoid sliders as they will slow down your site.

 

How Google AMP and Modern Web Technology Can Help

With Google AMP, you can make marked improvements to key metrics, including:

• A median load time of under 0.5 seconds.
• Less data than an equivalent non-AMP site.
• Increase sales conversion rates by about 20%

 

 
Another option is Flutter, which is a user interface (UI) toolkit from Google that you can use to develop attractive, natively compiled applications for mobile and desktop. Flutter has several benefits:

• Fast Development – The hot reload feature facilitates smooth and simple experimentation, so you can build new UIs, fix bugs, and add features quickly and easily.
• Expressive, beautiful UI – Flutter has built-in Material Design and Cupertino widgets, rich motion APIs, for smooth, natural scrolling and platform awareness.
• Native Performance – The widgets and features are streamlined to provide a seamless native performance on both iOS and Android.

 

How Your Business Can Improve Conversion Rate Optimization

When you want to get in line with Google AMP, you need to make some improvements to your website. Follow these three best practices to attract more traffic through mobile:

• • Focus on Mobile Design – When your team is planning a new campaign — design it, test it and review it on mobile. Think like a visitor, and tailor the experience for mobile.

 

 

• • Aim for higher mobile conversion rates – Calculate your relative mobile conversion rate by dividing your mobile conversion rate with your desktop conversion rate. Let this value guide you, telling you whether your mobile site is getting stronger or weaker when you make changes.

 

 

• • Recruit specialist staff – Hire a CRO agency or data analytics professional to manage A/B testing and base UX decisions on data.

 

 

 

How to Optimize Mobile Conversion Rate

When you want to optimize your mobile conversion rates, you can make a lot of ground with the following approaches:

Qualitative Research

Consider the following techniques to get more valuable feedback from your customers and prospects:

1. Set tasks – For example, a retail site could ask a customer to pick the perfect winter coat. By asking them to find something they like, it activates their cognitive purchasing behaviors, and gives you more accurate, genuine results.
2. Encourage honesty – Let customers know you want them to be honest about your products, services, and customer service.
3. Record user sessions – Ask test visitors to record their screens so you can assess the UX for navigation issues, loading times, etc.

Through tests like these, you can document what people liked and disliked about your mobile site, along with ideas on how to improve the mobile UX — and your CRO.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research helps you discover insights and validate findings from your qualitative research. You can use Google Analytics to maximize the impact of this approach. Here are a few tips:

• Identify flaws in your funnel – Dig into your data and UX design to pinpoint flaws in your mobile site. With social listening and behavioral data analysis, you can identify where in the customer journey people are losing interest.
• Analyze patterns – Consider the most visited pages and landing pages, and use the Comparison View to help you establish patterns. What makes these pages strong compared to pages with weaker results?

 

Segment your audience to analyze one channel at a time, as this makes it easier to evaluate your pages and identify the aspects that require attention.

 

• Test value proposition – Some web designers have trouble evaluating their own work. By adhering to strict practices and processes, you can remain objective, and improve the mobile UX with your audience in mind.
• Clarity – If people can’t find something on your site, how will they buy it? Many designers favor aesthetics over clarity and speed, which can lead to problems when you want to grow sales. It’s worth your time and resources to shift your focus to creating a clear, clean website that makes the road to checkout smooth and easy.

 

 

 

• Use urgency – Customers want to see relevant content and offers. When brands offer messaging, products, and services that cater to our needs, we are more likely to respond. This personalization of marketing is more powerful when paired with urgency, such as in the form of a limited edition offer.

 
People have an innate fear of missing out — or FOMO — that can drive them to make impulsive purchasing decisions.

Different behavior types will respond differently to your persuasion techniques. Perform A/B testing with the following ideas to see what works for your audience:

• Limited edition offers
• Showing low stock notices
• Adding a countdown timer to when a sale ends

 

 

• Reduce purchase anxiety – On mobile, people have less screen space to compare products and services, which can heighten purchase anxiety.

 
Typically, the average customer will experience purchase anxiety in three stages of online shopping:

1. They worry if they are choosing the right product.
2. They worry about the features of the product and whether it can satisfy their needs.
3. They worry if they are buying from the right brand or website.

 

 

 

 

• Product comparison – Consumers will perform product comparison in many cases, especially for high-end products. Try to make this easy for them by avoiding any need to scroll or swipe between pages when comparing products. That way, they don’t need to memorize different product specs.

 

A/B Testing Guidelines

Testing is exciting and challenging — and essential if you want an excellent mobile CRO that Google AMP will love.

Use these guidelines to help you use A/B testing to make improvements on your mobile site:

• Step 1 – Configure the tool you will use for testing. Google Optimize is a free, user-friendly option.
• Step 2 – Check for flickering or FOOC (Flash of Original Content) when you begin testing.
• Step 3 – Setup tracking with Google Analytics.
• Step 4 – Create at least three wireframe solutions to resolve any issues. The more options you have, the less likely it is that you will be bound to one solution.
• Step 5 – Continue running tests until they return a clear winner.
• Step 6 – Avoid peaking too soon, as it can make you biased.

 

How to Run Tests in Google Optimize

Google Optimize is a website testing and experimentation platform. When you’re focused on Google AMP, Optimize can help your mobile sites in several ways:

• It is a unified product – Optimize offers four capabilities in one product — measurement, audience targeting, testing, and personalization.
• Consistent measurement – This platform is built on top of Google Analytics, so it ensures consistency as you use the same metrics to gauge performance and analyze user behavior.
• Powerful targeting capabilities – You can target specific customers based on data from Google Analytics.
• Ease of use – Multiple integrations and a visual editor provide a user-friendly experience, so anyone can quickly get started with Optimize.

 

Wrap Up

Google AMP came to prominence in the last few years. While Google is always making changes, site speed and mobile user experience will always be paramount in the digital age.

Keep mobile CRO in mind when designing your pages, and continue to test and analyze visitor behaviors and page elements regularly. Over time, you can improve your page speeds, which will lead to a better mobile UX and higher conversion rates.

Enhance your optimization game with our guide to Ultimate Campaign Optimization: 5 Core Areas and 20+ Tricks.