When I first added AMP pages to the Cobb County Courier it was just because someone advised me to do it. At the time I knew Accelerated Mobile Pages had something to do with site access via smartphones and other small-screen devices, but I was still oriented to desktop and laptop computers.
But I installed an AMP plugin and let it construct AMP pages from the content I posted, and didn’t think much more about it until early May of this year.
As I continue my education on AMP (and at the moment I’m reading everything I can get my hands on) I’ll post a series of “What is AMP and how does it work?” articles.
But for now I want to demostrate to you why it is critical to me at this point.
After May, when my project to improve the Courier’s Search Engine Optimization began showing results, and my web traffic began skyrocketing, I noticed that a lot of the new traffic was to my AMP pages.
I monitored it informally, but yesterday I set up a dashboard in Google Analytics to track traffic to AMP pages and non-AMP pages over different time ranges.
I included in the dashboard a table listing all the AMP pages by URL, along with the number of pageviews for each page, and another table with the non-AMP pages with pageviews.
To get summary counts I set up scorecards with total AMP, total non-AMP, and total pageviews of any type counted.
The tables by article urls will allow me to figure out what type of articles are likelier to get traffic to the AMP pages and which do better with traditional pages.
Here are the totals as of yesterday when I set the range to the past 30 days:
Total Pageviews: 112,524
AMP pageviews: 64,376
non-AMP pageviews: 48,148
(The first time I accessed the dashboard the total count of pageviews was off by one, but that seemed to correct on the second access.
This gives a clear picture of why I need to figure out how to make the best use of the AMP traffic.
The proportions are staggering to me, and make several things imperative.
First I need to grasp AMP advertising so that I can sell advertisers on local impressions, rather than intense feature-rich ads.
Second I have to figure out a way to convert readers who come to the site via Google search to regular readers who frequently access the site.
I plan on adding a sticky signup form to my AMP pages as soon as I figure out how to do it. That will be a first step in trying to build reader loyalty.
Finally, even though Google Page Speed Insights gives me higher marks for the AMP pages, I’m seldom out of the mid-range orange-coded numbers. I need to figure out how to be consistently in the green.
Publishers Notebook 