Google displaying AMP-based ads that are faster and more secure on regular web pages

With Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google set out to deliver a faster web experience on Android and iOS. Developing advertising that worked in a similar fashion was an important step to boost adoption, with Google now displaying AMPHTML ads on non-AMP pages.

As of January, 12% of all display ads served by Google are now AMPHTML ads. This is an 11x YoY increase at the expense of HTML5 ads. Created using the AMP framework, this new type of advertising “start[s] performant and stay[s] performant.”

This is due to the open source nature, with Google noting how code is “carefully reviewed by the project maintainers before being merged.” The AMP spec already includes several good-by-default UI components for ads, an analytics measurement framework, a spam detection system, and viewability measurement.

Such a process also drastically reduces the likelihood of AMPHTML ads having code that takes advantage of chipset level vulnerabilities or drain CPU by crypto-mining from users’ devices.

This trust allows AMPHTML to be rendered into a more performant same-origin (versus cross-origin) iframe, which results in faster loading ads. Advertisers see better ROI, while publishers benefit from higher revenue. For the latter group, Google notes a .87% increase in impressions in one experiment.

An AMPHTML ad on an Accelerated Mobile Page compared to the same ad on a regular page delivers better click-through rates and viewability. Over a third of ads served on AMP pages — which gives advertisers access to over 1 billion impressions/day worth of premium inventory — use AMPHTML ads.

Google also has a case study of how display ads created in AMPHTML vs HTML5 perform on AMP vs regular pages.

Simply moving from a standard HTML page to an AMP page (with the same HTML5 ad) resulted in a 26 percent CTR increase. Moving further to an AMP page with AMPHTML ads resulted in an additional 48 percent CTR increase.