Summary
From just 5% traffic on ABP Live to more than 50% of mobile device traffic coming through AMP pages we have seen the absolute traffic share grow to 50 Mn MAUs for ABP live, a 200% + growth in 2 years. We have increased the share of users from AMP Pages to atleast 40% and grow it to 5-8 folds within 24 months and ramp up its publishing traffic to 1000+ articles per day.
Challenge
With more than 90% of our traffic coming from mobile devices, ABP Live knows that providing a great reading experience on mobile devices is critical for our long-term success. Accelerated mobile pages have been at the center since its launch in 2016. ABP Live focuses on making mobile content load quickly as data shows that people abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn’t load quickly. Also, the site speed is a key factor in determining SERP rankings. Before 2020, Only about 5% of the traffic on ABP Live was based out of the AMP pages. From 2020, ABP Live planned to join the group of publishers and technology companies that extensively create the AMP Pages. Our focus was to increase the share of users from AMP Pages to at least 40% and grow by 5-8 folds within 24 months.
Objective
We were committed to improving speed across the board. If our site takes a long time to load, it doesn’t matter how great our journalistic content is, some people will leave the page before they see what’s there. We wanted to improve our user experience through quick loading time and ranking on Google organic search. We based our campaign on 3 key objectives - Grow AMP traffic across all existing languages from 10% to at least 40% of overall organic traffic source. Grow new languages traffic of AMP (we were planning to launch ABP Bihar, ABP Desam and ABP Nadu) Increase the crawlability factor for google so that its pushes our page ranks to the top.
Strategy
Mapping of gaps (internal benchmarking) - Getting started with AMP was easy because it is built on existing web technologies. And since AMP is not a template based system, we were able to host our content, style it as we see fit, and easily integrate our existing advertising, analytics and other business tools. We mainly focused on three basic elements - improving AMP performance by improving the header text input, changing the images layout and specifications that we had been using for our articles, and reducing Ad Frequencies on the amp pages to further reduce load time and user experience. Broad level Strategy: Improve AMP pages performance and maintain 80+ performance score on google lighthouse report. Create AMP versions of category and topic pages for fast load and improve accessibility of content across the website. Identify AMP errors and resolve within 30-180 minutes thus controlling any loss of traffic from AMP Pages. Set up a custom SOP for teachnology and product integration on AMP pages to maintain the desirable performance and further amplify growth. Create AMP versions of all story formats: Text stories Videos Blogs/Opinions Photo Galleries Live Blogs
Data
Our journey started in June 2020 where the ABP Pages had a traffic of around 15 Million users every month. Keeping COVID situation in mind and the way user were behaving at that point in time, we started with specific categories which we had seen a rise in traffic in the past 6 months of COVID. Slowly and steadily we started implementing strategies across all targeted segments. The growth took a sharp downturn post the normalization of COVID situation wherein we had to strategize the pages and vertical for AMP pages. Post analysing, we started implementing the strategies. By Feb 2022, in the span of 20 months we were able to scale the traffic of our AMP pages to 50 Million+ users monthly. This was a tremendious achievement. As of now, we have been able to deliver AMP versions for all the article pages that we publish and our share of traffic on AMP pages stands at 55% of the over all traffic, a growth of more than 45% two years earlier.
Solution
Results
The growth of traffic on AMP pages through This helped us to climb from the 17th spot on Comscore MMX in Jan ‘20 to the 6th spot in March ‘22. ABP Live currently serves content across 8 India languages with millions of pages in AMP format. Add Growth Graph with Figures ABP Live has seen a 200% Increase in overall traffic on AMP Pages since its implementation with more than 50% traffic currently attributed to AMP Page for mobile devices. 1000+ Articles ABP Live publishes in AMP HTML Daily across 8 Languages.
