AMP on Blog

anselmomassad · ‎Apr 13, 2017

Hi!

We faced some problems on enabling AMP on HubSpot. The native implementation of Acelerated Mobile Pages allowed faster access, but we lost traffic and SERP positions in Google.

There are some hipothesis to explain that, but it is not conclusive and we decided to rollback and disable the resource.

Does anybody have better experience with this feature? (worse experiences are also welcome).

anselmomassad · ‎Jun 8, 2017

Thanks for replying.

In March, we were in a very good situation in terms of audience (7 to 10% growth MoM in unique visitors). It seemed a great idea to offer our content via AMP to grow faster in mobile searches.

We placed 3 steps to understand the behavior (and they did not work to prevent the risks). First, a week of testing applying HubSpot AMP in 2 pieces of content. Second, 2 weeks of testing applying HubSpot AMP in 12 pieces of content. Because they were blog posts with relatively low mobile visits, there were low impacts (because there was almost 0 organic traffic going to AMP).

The 3rd wave was applying to all blog posts.

Our mistake was the following: we use a customized template for our blog (coded, not using HubSpot template builder). In this situation, we had to place, on the template <head>, the meta tag to show search bots the URL of the AMP version.

We should have rolled back from the AMP implementation for all the blog posts, and started again the tests with a few pieces. But because we did not know that was indeed the reason we had no traffic until then, we did not roll back.

The impact is that we lost the possibility of tracking users who visited our blog in mobile devices. We also lost impressions for our call to actions -- each CTA is the path to an offer, in a standard inbound strategy.

All we could see was a drop in traffic in the exact same share of mobile visits we had before that. And we the number of new leads coming from those offers also dropped, but in a smaller intensity.

We discover some issues (errors) on the AMP implementation (i.e.: our blog is set up in "pt-br", but the AMP language meta tag was "en").

After 2 weeks with no data about the AMP traffic and behavior, we finally concluded, with no doubts, via Search Analytics report (from Google Search Console), that our AMP pages were losing positions and traffic and impressions on the SERP.

Then, we decide to roll back.

As far as I understand, the issue was related to the fact that we use a fully customized template on the blog. So, the "conversion" of some of the HTML tags we use into AMP standards did not work well. We use that customized template for other reasons (including some SEO white hat hacks, such as good open graph and schema usages) and it did not make sense to change it to template builder.

To be clear: I am neither a detractor of HubSpot nor a detractor of the AMP feature. But it was very frustrating because we had high expectations on its potential.

View solution in original post

hffmr · ‎Jun 22, 2018

Hello community!

We'd like to use AMP for our blog posts. Unfortunately, there seems no way to really use the full featureset of AMP in the blog. Does anybody have a similar problem and got a solution? An answer from the Hubspot team is also highly appreciated.

I will describe the problem in detail and add a feature request in the end.

Our problem

As we are working in the audio production area, we put our podcasts or small snippets of podcasts into our blog posts. That's why it is a requirement to have at least somehow a player or in the best case our branded player (using javascript and so on) embedded in our blog posts no matter whether AMP is enabled or not.

We totally understand what AMP is all about, so we are willing to use the special AMP audio components instead of "heavy" javascript. But it seems that we are not able to implement any "AMP native" components into the blog code which then will render correctly as AMP player. The only thing we could get running was the iframe component but it isn't the best solution for us to have an iframe in both our normal and the AMP blog.

My feature request
It would be great to use the native audio-tag (or other components) to get it converted into AMP audio without any hassle.

In addition, it would be awesome to have kind of a switch which can be used to determine, what will be used for the normal blog and what is optimized for AMP pages. I could imagine something like this:

{% if AMP_enabled %}
<amp-audio></amp-audio>
<!-- or an amp iframe which will load a small page with our custom player -->
{% else %}
<audio id="ourcustomplayer"></audio>
<!-- this will rely on a custom javascript code -->
{% endif %}

Does anybody else could need these features?
@Hubspot What do you think about it?

Thanks in advance!

Anonymous · ‎Jun 8, 2017

I don't have any personal experience with this, but I'd be interested to know if/how your experience has developed?

anselmomassad · ‎Jun 8, 2017