Google rolls out Accelerated Mobile Pages for ads

Google first unveiled and rolled out its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project in October last year in a bid to allow content to load faster on mobile devices. Last week the company announced a solution designed to address the problem of slow loading ads.

For the uninitiated, AMP is an open-source project that allows a mobile browser to load web pages much faster by simplifying the underlying HTML code for faster loading. In a way, the new AMP for ads (A4A) does the same by allowing marketers to create optimized ads that will load as fast as AMP-formatted content.

“With AMP for Ads, we’re bringing everything that’s good and fast about AMP to ads. Unfortunately, most advertisers’ campaign creatives are not fully optimized for mobile experiences,” wrote Paul Muret, the vice president of Display, Video and Analytics at Google in a blog entry.

“AMP for Ads allows advertisers to build beautifully-designed ads in AMP HTML so that the entire AMP experience, both the publisher’s content and the advertiser’s creative, load simultaneously at AMP-speed,” he wrote.

The performance speedup is achieved by separating ad requests from ad rendering. This allows for faster ad rendering at no impact to the client CPU or memory cost. AMP pages will continue to support non-AMP ads at the moment.

“From the client’s perspective making the request itself is super cheap, but its side effect (the rendering of the ad) is expensive,” explained Malte Ubl, who is the tech lead for the AMP project in a lengthy update. “By separating the two, A4A achieves much faster ad rendering at no additional CPU and memory cost.”

Speeding up the loading time aside, A4A will take advantage of AMP’s features by minimizing resource impact. This is achieved by only animating display elements that are only visible on the screen, and throttling refresh rates in cases where the device is unable to achieve a specified target.

There is no question that slow load times can drive users away, and is especially important for mobile devices. Like AMP, there is no reason that A4A will not meet with similar levels of success with marketers.