Mobile consumers don’t like waiting for content, so Google Inc. is releasing some new features to ensure that – when it comes to ads, at least – they won’t have to.
This week DoubleClick, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based tech giant’s display ad placement division, released AMP for Ads, a feature that allows marketers to take advantage of the company’s fast-loading Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework; AMP Landing Pages, home pages that scale to fit screens of multiple sizes; and DoubleClick Bid Manager, which will allow advertisers to buy sponsored content programmatically.
“As an industry, we need to come together and think about better ads for all of our users,” Paul Muret (above), Google’s vice president of display, video ads and analytics said during a July 19 keynote at this year’s DoubleClick Leadership Summit, during which he likened the challenge to those faced by the taxi and hospitality industries in the face of high-profile disruptors Uber and AirBNB.
“No one could have predicted what happened in the last 20 years, just like I can’t predict… what will happen next,” Muret said. “But what I can tell you is that winning starts with creating an amazing user experience that delights your customers.”
The first salvo in Google’s efforts to help advertisers deliver a memorable experience is AMP for Ads, a marketer-friendly version of an open-source framework it began developing with publishers last October that, on average, loads pages four times more quickly and uses 10 times less data than traditional HTML programming.
The second is AMP landing pages, which advertisers will be able to use to create a homepage-like foundation for additional content, ensuring the user experience as readers click from the publisher’s website to their sponsor’s is a smooth one.
According to Google’s own research, the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load, and that mobile sites which load within five seconds can earn up to double the revenue of their 19-second counterparts.
To put that in perspective, the company has also concluded that every 400-millisecond delay (the time it takes to blink) in delivering search results leads to a 0.74 per cent drop in overall search volume, Muret said.
“Our expectations for what you can get done in the moment have gone up tremendously, and the brands that are recognizing that and stepping up and engaging with consumers on that front are the ones that are winning,” he said.
Naturally, Google is collaborating with publishers to implement AMP as well – 77 per cent of publisher web pages still take more than 10 seconds to load on a mobile device, Muret noted – but by extending the feature to marketers, ads will be able to keep up, he said.
Another weapon in the battle against boring content which has become increasingly popular is native advertising, or sponsored content – that is, advertising that matches the look, feel, and style of a publisher’s original material (ITBusiness.ca’s parent company, ITWC, provides native advertising services to the tech industry; you can read an example here).
To help marketers adopt this user-friendly format, DoubleClick’s new Bid Manager service allows advertisers to buy native ads programmatically – and will automatically scale content to fit the context and format of the site or app in which it appears.
You can see a demonstration below.
