Dive Brief:
- eBay is adopting Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on 8 million of its mobile web pages in order to improve its mobile experience, according to Venture Beat.
- eBay announced in a blog post that it is working with Google to add elements such as smart buttons, advanced tracking and A/B testing to help foster AMP for e-commerce.
- AMP officially launched at the end of February 2016 and was initially targeted toward publishers as a competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News.
Dive Insight:
Initiatives like eBay’s are probably what Google was hoping for by making AMP open-source, unlike Facebook Instant Articles and Apples News, which are both walled off in their respective gardens. Even though the base technology was designed around quickly serving publishers' mobile content, the project is already being pushed into new realms only four months after launch, such as e-commerce and mobile browsing.
“The AMP project was announced around the same time we started the initial brainstorming for browse. It seemed to resonate a lot with our own thinking on how we wanted to render the new experience," Senthil Padmanabhan, eBay principal web engineer, wrote in the blog post. "Although AMP was more tuned towards publisher-based content, it was still an open source project built using the open web. Also, a portion of the traffic to the new browse experience is going to be from search engines, which made it more promising to look into AMP.”
According to Google, AMP pages load 85% faster than standard mobile pages. As consumers continue to move to mobile, brands need to ensure their mobile pages and ads load quickly.
