This post is a modified and expanded version of one I posted to a social media forum dedicated to small publishing ad sales.
For a small publisher, the complexity that comes with a sudden increase in traffic is a good problem to have in some ways, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
In the case of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) the problem comes from two directions.
The first is suddenly having two completely different advertising environments to manage, with different formats and best practices.
The second is explaining this to advertisers in a clear way.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve had an order-of-magnitude jump in traffic due to changes I made that increased page load speed in late April and early May.
Google loves page speed, and rewards it with higher ranking.
Before then, 20,000 page views was a good month for me.
Every month since May, inclusive, I’ve exceeded 112,000.
But since Google prioritizes AMP pages in its ranking system when if finds them, a very large portion of that jump goes to my Accelerated Mobile Pages, which have their own ad slots, with heavy restrictions on design due to page speed optimizations (for example, the size has to be known in advance so that AMP can set the framework before content is loaded, so no dynamically-sized ads are allowed).
Here is a 30-day period I examined with Google Analytics a few days ago.
Total Pageviews: 112,524
AMP pageviews: 64,376
non-AMP pageviews: 48,148
In a media kit that total number looks great compared to where I was before April, and even traditional access to my site has more than doubled.
But note that 64,376 of those page views generate no impressions for traditional advertisers (whose ads are on the non-AMP pages) whether the ads are well situated for mobile (inside story, leaderboard) or not (sidebar ads).
I made my first attempt to directly sell AMP ads to a customer yesterday, and got an email from him this morning in which it’s clear he thought I was pitching him Google ads, rather than AMP ads targeting a local audience.
The current state of my AMP ad zones isn’t all downside.
I had Broadstreet, the ad service company I use, set up two AMP zones and for the time being rotate Google Adsense ads into those zones.
My revenue from the Adsense ads in the AMP zones caused my total revenue from Adsense ads to increase from about $30 per month (paid every quarter or so), to $350 during the last 1-month period, and a likely $250 for this month (paid every month since both those figures exceed the $100 payment threshold).
That isn’t enough to float the site but is enough to supplement my budget to hire freelance reporters.
This is a good problem to have in some ways, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
My goal is to figure out best practices for AMP ads that are effective for customers, and to learn how to clearly explain the benefits of the ads to customers.
I feel like the canary in the coal mine on this one in some ways. I haven’t received any indication that other publishers are experiencing the lopsided traffic to AMP ads I’m experiencing, judging by the feedback I’ve gotten so far.
Publishers Notebook 