As Google pushes its AMP (accelerated mobile pages) project among publishers, assuring them of the traffic and efficiency gains, a new research finds some shortcomings in that promise. Web analytics service Chartbeat writes: Chartbeat, together with The Daily Beast, collaborated on a two-part research study to rigorously quantify the effect of adopting the Google-backed Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format on publisher traffic. This study is the first formal statistical analysis of the effects of AMP on website traffic. The overall result of this study is a methodology for analysis that we hope will be useful to other data scientists. Our overarching finding is that AMP boosts traffic for publishers on average, but most publishers are not average. Only 1 in 3 we analyzed could see clear statistical evidence of a traffic increase. Though it may be possible to optimize AMP implementation to improve monetization, publishers seeing lower revenue on the platform will have a hard time making the case that a traffic boost will make up for it. The first is an A/B test run by The Daily Beast in which, at random, half of newly published articles were published in the AMP format and half were published in the standard format. This test failed to show clear statistical evidence of higher Google-driven page views on the AMP than non-AMP content. Meanwhile The Daily Beast observed clearly lower revenue for the AMP format.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot