FEB 13, 2018
Grupo Expansión boosts monetization with AMP
Who is Grupo Expansión?
Founded in 1966, Mexico City-based Grupo Expansión began by providing business and finance news to readers throughout Mexico. Today, the company has grown to include a portfolio of 19 magazines and 12 websites, including InStyle, Elle, Travel + Leisure Mexico and CNNMéxico. As the largest online conglomerate in Mexico, Grupo Expansión reaches nearly 30 million unique readers each month.
Solution
Grupo Expansión sought to enhance the user experience on their mobile websites, so they decided to implement a solution using the AMP framework. The publisher’s in-house development team took a phased approach through their content management system (Brightspot), with the first stage of development taking only two weeks. During this time, they converted existing content across both articles and galleries—where 90% of their traffic resides. Grupo Expansión then began making improvements based on best practices, including adding links to related content at the bottom of each article as well as applying a robust advertising strategy to ensure their AMP pages are profitable.
When we noticed traffic to our AMP pages was growing, we started paying more attention to the advertising, looking around at which formats worked better and which ad positions would be nice to have on the search results page.
Marco Fernandez, development manager at Grupo Expansión
Results
Since launching their AMP pages, Grupo Expansión has seen a 76% increase in traffic with users spending more than twice the amount of time on site. Additionally, their AMP pages are 80% faster than non-AMP pages.
The team also implemented a range of engaging ad formats that were easy to implement on AMP, including video ads, sticky ads and flying carpet ads. The ads have yielded a 150% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR) compared to ads on non-AMP pages. “We saw a great increase here,” says Rene Flores, innovation manager, Grupo Expansión. “In fact, we prioritize serving ads on AMP pages in our direct sales and programmatic guaranteed deals because the ads perform better, with an average viewability rate of 83%.”
Looking to the future, Grupo Expansión plans to move all of their mobile content to AMP, starting with redirecting all of their Twitter traffic and newsletter traffic to AMP pages. They’re also planning to integrate their data management platform and header bidding solution to generate even more revenue from ads on their AMP pages.
We think that AMP is a great decision. Publishers should look at AMP as a starting point for growing their business, not a destination.
Flores shared words of advice with industry peers who are considering adopting AMP