MARCH 6, 2017
Milestone drives conversions with AMP pages for local hospitality site
For nearly 20 years, Milestone has helped businesses in the hospitality, retail and financial services industries develop high-performance digital solutions. At the core of their strategy, Milestone’s leadership believes that the best possible digital experiences are created with the best available technologies. “From being an early adopter of Schema markup to leading on voice search, we’re always on the lookout for innovations that can help create a better user experience for our clients’ customers,” said Benu Aggarwal, Milestone’s President and Founder.
In the last few years, the sweeping adoption of mobile devices spurred Milestone to search for ways to improve the mobile experience for their clients’ increasingly mobile audience. When Aggarwal and her team found out about the AMP initiative in early 2016, they saw it as a great solution for their hospitality clients, whose customers were researching and booking rooms on their smartphones at a rapidly growing rate.
Solution
As part of their omnichannel strategy, Milestone’s standard practice is to track their clients’ page speeds across devices; AMP fit right into this performance-focused approach. “The promise of speed from the AMP framework was a big draw.” said Aggarwal. “For small to mid-size businesses’ websites, AMP pages have the added advantage of being able to leverage Google caches, something otherwise unaffordable by most of these smaller organizations.”
After researching AMP, Milestone approached a long-time San Francisco Bay Area client, Millwood Inn, about implementing AMP pages as part of the plans for developing their mobile site. Millwood Inn’s site was key to their business because more and more customers were booking rooms using their mobile phones. In fact in 2016, the majority of traffic for Millwood was on mobile. That meant that fast loading pages were critical to ensuring a great user experience and essential to the bottom line. Milestone’s in-house development team used AMP HTML to build the Inn’s five most-important pages. The Milestone team also set up AMP in Galexi™, their proprietary content management system—simplifying future efforts to create new AMP pages. “Building the AMP site was a 1 to 2-week effort,” said Aggarwal. “That included development, testing, discovery, and search analytics.”
Results
Once Milestone launched Millwood Inn’s new mobile site, the results were astonishing.
- Mobile transactions jumped more than 83%
- Conversion rates leaped more than 68%
- Total booked revenue on mobile increased more than 52%
Additionally, compared to the non-AMP pages, the AMP pages yielded a 61% better clickthrough rate (CTR) and those users drove 83% higher rates of transactions. “Engagement and conversions are especially important for our clients,” said Aggarwal. “And as mobile traffic continues to grow, we expect the engagement and conversion numbers to grow as well.”
Milestone itself was so impressed by the metrics generated for Millwood that the agency has featured AMP development as part of their core offering, and they’re ready to add new AMP features as they become available.