Google wants to improve the mobile ad experience, which is too slow and reliant on desktop ad formats.
Its solution? AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) ads and the expansion of programmatic native, both of which Google VP Paul Muret introduced Tuesday at the company’s DoubleClick Leadership Summit.
“Winning starts with creating an amazing user experience that delights your customers,” Muret said.
Google has recently focused on creating better mobile ad experiences as some industry watchers accused the company of being late to mobile compared to Facebook. But last fall, Google introduced the open-sourced AMP Project, designed to help publishers speed mobile load times. Until today, Google hadn’t tackled faster ads within AMP.
And although Google sat on the sidelines while competitors built out programmatic native solutions, its sudden entrance into the space adds a huge, highly scaled competitor that smaller native ad tech companies must contend with.
AMP Ads
Though still in alpha, AMP Ads allows advertisers to load ads fast alongside AMP publisher content. Advertisers must develop creative using the same tech and templates as AMP publishers.
But Google said the payoff for both advertisers and publishers is, according to recent tests, loading speeds four times faster that use 10 times less data.
Advertisers will already have a lot of AMP supply to work with. Though Google’s goal is to get the entire web on AMP, it’s amassed 145 million AMP documents across 640,000 domains since creating it last fall. AMP ads work on non-AMP pages too. There, they use less data and processing capacity.
Google claims publishers can double their revenue when pages load within 5 seconds, not the current 19-second average, which also improves retention. The Washington Post reported that 63% of mobile search visitors returned within 7 days, up from 51% pre-AMP.
Native Programmatic
When Google’s programmatic native advertising product launched last November, it only included mobile app inventory through DoubleClick for Publishers.
Now, buyers using Google’s DSP DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) can buy programmatic native units anywhere on mobile – both web and app.
That includes any site or app where units are assembled from an array of creative components. For instance, advertisers using DBM could buy inventory on Facebook Exchange (FBX) – at least until it shuts down in November.
Publishers can create native ad inventory both on mobile web and mobile app and offer it up to any exchange programmatically or through direct or private deals.
Finally, Google will also support outstream video, popularized by companies like Teads.
