This does seem quite counter intuitive to say that AMP is bad. I recently wrote an article outlining the main pros and cons associated with adopting AMP for mobile web pages. They increase search engine ranking, loading speed and decrease the load on your hosting servers. However, with them comes a lack/decrease of ads, the lack of ability to analyse traffic and potentially a different theme from your normal mobile theme. Out of these points, the one that people will care about is going to be the search engine ranking and, potentially more/just as important, the lack of adverts. A lot of the time, AMP pages have less ads on them, especially if they want to decrease the time to load.
This is a really interesting point that I wanted to explore with one of my websites, PoemAnalysis.com. Months ago, I had installed a plugin that made pages become AMP – I didn’t notice any increase/decrease in mobile ranking, so it is difficult to say how it affected the ranking of pages on mobile (Google search engine console did not show any significant change either). What I did find was a significant change to my earnings through advertising.
The website uses Ezoic to monetize the traffic, with adverts appearing through the content, above/below content and in the sidebar. Ezoic uses artificial intelligence/machine learning to find out what works best to make websites the most money from advertising, with regards to ad types, sizes, locations and much more.
As stated above, AMP had been installed on Poem Analysis for quite some time (between 3-6 months). The majority of pages were AMP-enabled, meaning that mobile traffic saw AMP pages for articles the vast majority of the time. I switch off AMP early October and this is the impact it had to EMPV (earning per thousand visitors):
We can see an increasing trend from early October onwards. I can understand that summer tends to be a time that EMPV is typically low. However, May has always been the website’s highest EMPV time of year, so we can see just how large an impact turning AMP has had to monetizing mobile traffic.
What Did I Learn?
AMP is a really good idea that improves the load time and ranking of mobile pages. But, if you monetize your traffic through advertising, be very cautious how you ‘AMP’ the mobile pages, since it is very possible that adverts will not be shown the same way as before, in the same locations, or simply less adverts are shown.
It does not also help platforms such as Ezoic, since AMP pages are run on Google’s servers, so it is hard to analyse the traffic, to see what advert combinations work best.
All in all, I am going to revert back to not using AMP. I have not noticed a drop in SEO for mobile, but have seen revenue increase for mobile traffic nearly 600% – for the website, it seems a no brainer.
