• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 9, 2017

Website load times increase. Conversion rates rise. Bounce rates decrease. Click-through rates jump from search to web pages. Companies have found that implementing Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) isn't easy, but companies explain why it's worth the challenge.

Vox Media, cited by Stone Temple Consulting in a report released Monday, found it challenging to reach 100% implementation, but said "given the new search environment brought on by AMP we have still managed to grow our search audience year-over-year."

Analysts at Stone Temple Consulting interviewed nearly a dozen companies from various industries that had implemented AMP on most or all of their pages, including companies the consulting firm helped with their implementation. The firm helped to build AMP pages to understand what is involved and asked about their own implementation process and issues, resulting metrics, and return on investments.

The study also analyzes various myths and shares key takeaways from the participating companies such as media publishers, lead-generation sites, and ecommerce. 

The findings aim to help marketers understand potential benefits from implementing AMP, the amount of effort required, solutions to some challenges, and potential ROI.

One of the sections in the study on AMP, specifically for mobile, examines the importance of load times for pages. One of the goals for AMP is to "level that playing field" and give all companies the same advantage.

An increase of 0.1 seconds in load time for a page on Amazon, for example, could increase sales by 1%, with an impact of $1.3 billion annually, according to the report. A one-second decrease in load time on Walmart resulted in 2% increase in conversions. The impact was $274 million annually.

The impact on website visits goes beyond speed. On Yahoo, a 0.4-second decrease in page load times resulted in 9% increase in traffic, with an impact of 600 million visitors per month.

There is also a "huge incremental traffic opportunity created by the AMP News Carousel." It appears as a Top Story on desktop.

Placement in this carousel on mobile is available only to AMP pages, and it represents a huge UI change from the normal search engine results pages, according to the report.

These are a fraction of the findings from the report, which marketers can download here.