Introduced in 2016 as Google’s response to other mobile publishing platforms like Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an open-source initiative enabling the mobile website visitors of publishers like The New York Times to quickly access content such as articles and opinion postings with fast download speeds.
AMPs are characterized with stripped-down, mostly textual content and simple, no-clutter page layouts, and are hosted by Google, which in theory ensures fast downloads. Google has restrictions on what type of content can be included on AMPs, utilizes special HTML and coding, and allows only very basic styling (read: design) of the page.
AMP pages are built with three core components:
- AMP HTML is regular HTML with some HTML tags replaced with AMP-specific tags, called AMP HTML components, to enable common patterns that are easy to implement and provide reliable performance.
- The AMP JS library ensures the fast rendering of AMP HTML pages via asynchronous optimizations of external resources, so nothing in the page can block anything from rendering.
- The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network (CDN) for delivering AMPs by caching AMP documents and improving page performance automatically.
Google AMP content is featured as news and info “teasers” in the Google AMP carousels of mobile search engine results pages (SERPs), with a link to the source of the news or info (e.g., the hotel website).
Why Should Hoteliers Care About Google AMP?
Today’s hotel planning and booking customer journey is becoming increasingly complex as we operate in a multi-device, multi-channel, and multi-touchpoint environment. On average, the travel consumer goes through 18 different touchpoints before making a booking (Google Research). Each of these touchpoints presents an opportunity for the hotel to build a brand connection, influence intent and booking decision, and be there for the travel consumer every step of the way.
Nine out of ten people are “cross-device” Internet browsers and researchers, using multiple devices sequentially and moving from one device to another at different times. By enhancing the mobile experience with Google AMP, it becomes an even greater contributor as a touchpoint that allows hoteliers to engage potential guests and bring them to the hotel website to learn more and (hopefully) to book.
Overall, the benefits of Google AMP include:
