AMP

OCTOBER 7, 2016

plista grows publisher revenue & user engagement with AMP

plista
133% Average growth in CPMs
220% Average growth in CTRs

As users increasingly turn to their mobile devices for information, Germany-based native advertising platform plista has seen its mobile revenue grow 10X over the last 3 years. As a content recommendation tool, plista is constantly tweaking its algorithm to help publishers meet their goals. plista offers publishers an all-in-one solution for content distribution using native advertising. With mobile users growing impatient with slow-loading sites, plista was naturally interested in the AMP project for the speed and performance offered by AMP pages.

Speed: A new key performance indicator

As a content recommendation tool, plista is constantly tweaking its algorithm to help publishers meet their goals. Through the integration with AMP, plista started tracking a new performance indicator: the load time for its mobile app widgets. Between March and July of 2016, plista conducted A/B tests with 10+ premium publishers, including n-tv.de, faz.net, abendzeitung.de, and golem.de to measure AMP’s impact on web app widget speed and profitability. The study focused on the correlation between speed and click-through rates (CTR) and cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPMs) for publishers.

Speed = Revenue

“The results of the tests were impressive”, says Torben Brodt, Director Data Engineering at plista. For one publisher, CTRs were 600% greater after the implementation of AMP, while the average increase for publishers in the test was 220%. CPMs also grew 133% on average, with one client seeing 5X greater returns. Looking at both CTRs and CPMs together, it was clear that publishers in the test were seeing greater overall revenue and engagement after the mobile web app widget was AMPified.

Building the open source project together

“Another big advantage of AMP is its easy implementation and code stability, as well as the supportive open-source community. It took us just a few days to implement AMP and get our first publisher up and running on it,” says Brodt. plista was able to begin preparing the asynchronous code library with extra tracking support the same day it signed its contributor license. The AMP Project provided a locally buildable runtime, tests and documentation to assist in a fast ramp-up, and just one day later, plista submitted its first source code commit (consisting of 20 lines of code and 20 lines of documentation) for review and testing. With easy-to-use code snippets and a quick approval process, publishers were able to implement AMP soon after.

From day one, through its publisher test and beyond, plista has found AMP an amazingly fast, easy and effective way to help its publishers significantly increase their bottom lines by speeding up mobile web app widget load times -- which also boosts user engagement and exposure for advertisers

Torben Brodt, Director Data Engineering at plista.