• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 17, 2017

Google released an update to its product roadmap for its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, the open source initiative aimed at making the web experience faster. The update represents a quarterly overview of planned features for the thirds quarter in 2017, but it also provides a look back at Q2 2017 and what the team accomplished. 

Deeper integration of ads in the AMP format landing pages across buy and sell-side platforms, offline support, enabling better mobile payments becomes the focus for the AMP group during the third quarter this year.

And it's not just about improving transactions on smartphones. Mobile payments are slowly catching on in IoT devices. Companies like Mastercard would love to say goodbye to the plastic and go digital. In a bid to reinvent payment systems, the company announced in April it partnered with a startup to enable consumers to make payments at vending machine through its digital wallet.

The more digital data owned by Mastercard the easier it becomes to keep track of where, when, why and how someone reached for their phone or mobile wearable device to make a purchase. All these data points create behavioral patterns in which to more accurately serve advertising.

Google claims that more than 1.5 billion AMP pages have been published and more than 100 analytics, ad tech and content management system providers support the format.

During the second quarter of 2017, some of the themes Google focused on making it easier to build AMP pages, better support for data entry for forms and search boxes, enhanced support for content formats such as news articles and local listings, and support for engaging in video.

Google also began focusing on improving support for ecommerce analytics, video analytics and all around basic analytics and event triggers.

Companies like Adobe have begun to add support for AMP in their analytics platforms.