OCTOBER 7, 2016
Wired AMP’s its 20+ year archive to meet audiences online
Challenge
Wired’s philosophy is to meet audiences wherever they are online. The San Francisco-based print and online publisher reports on technology and its impact on politics, culture, and the economy. The publisher saw AMP as an opportunity to speed up the mobile experience as well as to be eligible for the AMP-powered Google Search Top Stories carousel. Samuel Baldwin, Product Manager for Wired.com, said “Site performance is a company-wide KPI, and we see our work on AMP as furthering the business need of providing a fast, clean user experience to our audience.”
Solution
The team at Wired.com took a measured approach to rolling out AMP. They began by creating AMP pages for all stories published in 2016. After a few months of positive data with that group, they expanded coverage to include the entire 24-year archive of Wired.com, over 100k stories. There are a few exceptions, however. At the moment they currently exclude digital interactives, high impact feature stories, liveblogs (these pages will be implemented in AMP soon), and any story that has an image gallery in it.
Results
After a deep dive of analysis of results in July, Wired found AMP to have a positive impact on key metrics. Average click through rates from search results improved by 25%. Click through rates on ads in AMP stories increased by 63%.
Conclusion
“We’re excited to try more AMP features and see the format supported on a variety of new platforms.”
With AMP pages showing positive results, Wired hopes to expand its investment in the format by contributing to the open source project around the image gallery experience. About 40% of Wired’s content has not yet been implemented in the AMP format - much of this is content containing image galleries. “Galleries are a template with high ad inventory impact on the mobile web and low inventory impact with the current AMP implementation options. We need a better UX for AMP galleries, something that can accommodate long captions, images with different aspect ratios, recirculation widgets, and, of course, ads. It also needs to feel cool and load fast,” said Baldwin. Overall, the team is pleased with early AMP results. Baldwin added, “We’re excited to try more AMP features and see the format supported on a variety of new platforms.”