Building the future of email with AMP

The AMP Project’s mission is to enable more user-first experiences on the web, including web-based technology like email. For most of us, not much has changed in email functionality since the first time we were introduced to email. Because AMP is inherently fast and secure, we brought AMP technology to email in order to give users an interactive, real-time experience that also keeps inboxes safe.

AMP now enables all-new email experiences like being able to submit RSVPs to events, fill out questionnaires, browse catalogs, or respond to comments right within the email. Emails can also stay up to date, displaying the freshest content from comment threads or the latest recommendations.

Dynamic email built using AMP by Ecwid

Bringing AMP emails to major email providers

The AMP for email spec has engagement from major email providers around the world including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com, and Mail.Ru. As each of these providers launches support, senders will scale the reach of their AMP emails to users. 

After a developer preview with top email senders, Gmail is launching general availability of AMP for Email today. You can head to the Gmail blog to see some illustrative examples of the email recipient experience. You can also check out these provider specific pages for additional information:

• Yahoo Mail
• Outlook.com
• Mail.Ru

We aim to provide the highest quality email experiences for our consumers and we are excited to be one of the first providers to participate in the AMP for email spec. This allows us to enable fast, responsive, and high-performing experiences right within email.
– Marcel Becker, Director Product Management for Yahoo Mail

If you develop an email provider and would like to consider adding AMP for email support, you can find more information here. 

Start creating AMP emails today

Email senders can begin creating AMP emails by using the playground which allows you to edit markup and see real-time changes to your email. For more information about the supported features and syntax, head over to amp.dev. It’s important to note that some providers may have sender whitelists that limit who is eligible to send AMP emails, so be sure to register with providers if that’s the case. 

If you rely on a third party for your emails, please ensure they have AMP support. The following email products already support the AMP spec or in the process of launching support soon:

• SparkPost, an email delivery and analytics platform
• Litmus, an email design and marketing tools suite
• Twilio Sendgrid, an email platform for transactional and marketing emails that is used by over 80,000 companies.
• Amazon SES and Amazon Pinpoint, cloud-based email sending and analytics services for transactional and marketing emails
• More are in progress, so contact your email service providers to find out if they support AMP email

AMP emails are designed to be compatible in the current email ecosystem with the introduction of a new MIME part. This design allows emails to fall back to HTML if a provider or email client doesn’t support AMP emails yet—learn more about the spec and recommended guidelines. 

New AMP email working group

To make AMP the best user-friendly email experience, we need your help to contribute to its direction. This is why we created the AMP for email working group under AMP’s governance model, a way to channel feedback from senders and providers to support ongoing spec improvements.

The two goals of this group are to:

1. Increase email provider knowledge sharing to promote higher cross-provider compatibility of sender emails
2. Channel community feedback to senders and providers to support ongoing innovation of the spec

If you are an email provider, sender or would simply like to get involved in the AMP for Email working group, you can file discussion issues on the ampproject/wg-amp4email repositoryor come chat with us at #wg-amp4email on Slack. 

With the email spec being open source, strong multi-vendor support, a gradual migration strategy, and an open working group to have everyone’s voice heard, we’re looking forward to building a better email experience for everyone.

We look forward to your involvement! 

Posted by Vamsee Jasti, Product Manager, AMP Project

Announcing the AMP Conf Lineup!

Earlier this year we shared that AMP Conf 2019 will bring together the AMP community again this year in Tokyo on April 17-18. After over 70 talk submissions (thank you!), we’ve put together an extensive agenda at this year’s event. From learning about the potential for AMP stories in emerging markets, to allowing custom Javascript to run on an AMP page (crazy right!?), we hope you’re as excited as we are for this year’s lineup. And with the addition of AMP’s new governance, we’ll also hear for the first time from the Technical Steering Committee on their vision for the future of the project.

This year’s line-up includes:

The glory of amp-script: Unleashing the kraken	Kristofer Baxter, Google
Growing Up AMP First: Everything I Know I Learned From AMP	Melissa, Depuydt, WaPo
AMP Stories: The Story so far	Jon Newmuis & Wei Hong, Google
No power, no internet, no support: How AMP bridges the “app gap” in Iraq and other war-impacted regions	Levi Clancy, Re:Coded & Balla Khadang, YouGov
Advertising & AMP: Driving ROI with speed	Vamsee Jasti & Katharina Familia Almonte, Google
Providing AMP service to tens of thousands of ecommerce sites	Tommy Kang & Jinhyoung Kil, Cafe24

Check out the agenda in full on our site.

We still have a few spots remaining if you’d like to join us in person! Please apply here. Otherwise, all the talks will be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube channel.

We look forward to seeing you in Tokyo next month!

Posted by Matt Ludwig, AMP Marketing Lead at Google

Encouraging more voices in AMP

Last year we implemented changes in AMP’s governance model to encourage a wider variety of voices in the AMP community and to make it more clear how people can have a voice.  I’m happy to provide some updates on our progress towards these goals.

AMP’s Technical Steering Committee and Advisory Committee have started meeting

As part of AMP’s new governance model the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) sets AMP’s product and technical direction and the Advisory Committee (AC) provides advice to the TSC.  With these two groups we have representatives from nearly 20 companies & open web advocates helping to guide the AMP community towards our vision of “a strong, user-first open web forever.”

The TSC has now had several meetings, covering a range of topics from GitHub repository best practices to what AMP’s first set of Working Groups should be.  The AC also had their first meeting where they kicked off a conversation regarding horizontal reviews, a topic on which the TSC has asked for input.

If you have something you’d like to raise with one of these committees, you’ll find out how to do this in their “working mode” documents (TSC, AC).

Working Groups are ready for you to get involved

One of the TSC’s first acts was to establish the initial set of AMP Working Groups (WGs).

Working Groups are where the day-to-day work in AMP gets done.  A Working Group is responsible for a certain part of AMP, such as the Stories WG, which is responsible for AMP’s story format.

The Working Groups are intended to make it easier for people to keep track of different parts of AMP and to get involved.  To help with this, each Working Group has a GitHub repository that documents how to get updates on the Working Group’s work and how to get involved–from participating in discussions on issues and Slack to contributing bug fixes, features or other improvements.

I encourage you to find the Working Groups responsible for the areas you’re passionate about and to get involved!

We’ve made our process for making changes to AMP more clear

Although we’ve always said we strongly encourage contributions to AMP, we’ve heard it can be challenging to figure out the process for proposing and making changes and even to know where to get help.

Due to this feedback we’ve been working to improve and clarify the process for making changes in AMP, inspired by Chromium’s process for launching features.

Some of the highlights of these updates:

• We’ve made it more clear that small changes are easy to make without a lot of process overhead.
• We’ve added a slightly more formal launch process for significant changes, including the use of Intent-to-implement (I2I) and Intent-to-ship (I2S) issues and a more well-defined way of getting approval for making significant changes.
• We’ve made it easier to find a reviewer who can help you through the process of getting your change built and launched.

With AMP’s new governance model and contribution process updates in place we hope it’s easier than ever for you to stay up-to-date on what’s happening in AMP and to get involved!

Posted by Joey Rozier, AMP Engineering Manager at Google

Welcome to the AMP Roadshow 2019. First stop: Africa!

Posted by Ben Morss, Developer Advocate at Google

In 2017, we started the AMP Roadshow to educate and meet developers around the world. The Roadshow is a free one-day hands-on conference and workshop for new developers and seasoned AMP wizards alike, brought to your city. In 2018, the AMP team visited 21 cities in 10 countries around the world!

In 2019, we’ll be traveling to at least 20 more cities. We’re kicking things off with our very first visit to Africa, including stops in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya. You’ll find us in cities with established web development communities, but we’ll be increasing our efforts to go to places with newer web developers.

We’ll be showing off all of AMP’s new advanced features, but we also want to meet programmers and site owners who are newer to the web. We think AMP is a great place to start! Consequently we’ll be adding more chances to build your first AMP site, ask questions, and give us feedback. And we’ll feature new talks and demos as the year goes on.

We’ll add more destinations throughout the year. In the meantime, you can sign up now for the following events:

• Johannesburg
• Cape Town
• Lagos
• Nairobi

We can’t wait to meet you all in person. Come say hello!

What’s new in AMP, Q1 2019: Improvements to consent, videos, forms and lists

Video improvements

We have all experienced a situation where we want to watch a video and the related notes simultaneously. Good examples are a video of a recipe along with the instructions, or a video along with its transcript. The dock attribute on <amp-video> now supports minimizing the video to the corner of the viewport when the user scrolls. Developers can also customize where and how the video docks.

We also launched <amp-video-iframe>, which allows developers to include a custom-built video player that will obtain all the features available in the AMP Video Interface (e.g. autoplay, dock, etc.)

Tasty.co uses <amp-video-iframe> for their video recipes. Their custom player loops the video between a predefined start and end time. This allows them to use one video for different recipes by only seeking to the relevant segment of the video in each recipe.

Increased engagement and better resize with <amp-list>

<amp-list> now also allows developers to specify when they want the container to resize on user interaction, for e.g, when the <amp-list> contains an <amp-accordion> that a user taps on.

Additionally, we are experimentally adding infinite scroll capabilities to the component, so when the user reaches the end of a list of items (search results, product cards, etc), the list is populated with more items. A huge shout out to Chris Papazian from the Pinterest team for kicking this off. The AMP UI Working Group picked this up from Chris’ initial work and is excited to see this feature enabled in AMP to help publishers’ increase engagement!

Input masking in forms

To help make the task of filling in forms a bit easier, we’ve enabled input masking. This allows developers to add formatting like spaces and interstitial characters, which helps users fill out forms more efficiently. Dates, payment details and phone numbers are all great examples of inputs that could benefit from input masking.

Better transitions in <amp-lightbox-gallery>

The AMP UI Working Group has also been working on polishing already launched components to create a more delightful experience for end users. One such example is improved transitions for all images going to and from lightbox mode. This has been a hard problem to solve, as it involves interpolating between two images of different positions and sizes. You can visit our open source animations project for more details. Stay tuned for a technical blogpost that shares more insights into this work.

<amp-consent> now supports 3rd party integrations

We launched <amp-consent> in AMP a few months ago to simplify how publishers could collect data collection user consent on AMP pages. A number of publishers rely on 3rd party consent management platforms (CMP) to integrate with their web pages to manage consent status across various vendors. AMP now allows CMPs to easily integrate with AMP. If you are a publisher, you can also inline the configuration allowing you to show your own consent UI inside AMP. If you are a CMP, you can find instructions to integrate here.

Enhancements to <amp-ima-video>

The <amp-ima-video> component provides an easy to monetize publisher video with video ads from any video ad network that supports the IMA SDK. Our big thanks to Rebecca Close, an engineer working at Buzzfeed, who contributed and tested the following updates to the AMP project:

• Showing video controls on hover
• Video controls during Ad playback
• Muting / Unmuting videos
• Replaying / Looping videos
• Ad X of Y labels with i18n support

The best of the rest

• The <amp-date-display> component renders date information in various date formats and in different locales. A good use case for this is the news ecosystem, where users can see publishing dates for an article in their local time.
• AMP Stories now support Real Time Config when used with the Google Ad Manager ad implementation, allowing you to enhance the ad request with additional targeting information.

Upcoming features worth a shout

Below are a few things the AMP team has been working on:

• A dedicated component for typeahead autocomplete in AMP. If you have any thoughts please file feedback here.
• A new carousel experience that we are looking to launch soon over the upcoming months.
• An easy-to-deploy Service Worker library for AMP. You can learn more about it over in its GitHub repo.
• A component that helps developers integrate reCaptcha v3 on AMP documents. For more details, see the GitHub issue.
• We have made a number of updates to AMP Stories including support for links in the top 80%, a hamburger menu, hold to pause, a new desktop UI, and attachments. Stay tuned for a full post with updates soon.

* * *

Thanks to the AMP development community for your work and feedback. As always, please let us know if you have any issues or feature requests.

Posted by Naina Raisinghani, Product Manager, AMP Project at Google

Using AMP to make display ads safer, faster and better for users

Editor’s note: The following post was originally published on the Google Ads Blog by Vamsee Jasti, AMP Product Manager at Google.

The performance benefits and security guarantees offered by AMPHTML ads, which are display ads created using the AMP framework, translate to better advertiser ROI, publisher revenue and overall better user experience. Because of this, Google has expanded serving AMPHTML ads not only to AMP pages, but also to regular web pages. As of January this year, 12% of all display ads served by Google are now AMPHTML ads.

All of the code in the AMP repository is open source which is carefully reviewed by the project maintainers before being merged. As a result, ads written in AMP start performant and stay performant. Such a process also drastically reduces the likelihood of AMPHTML ads having code that takes advantage of chipset level vulnerabilities or drain CPU by crypto-mining from users’ devices. 

Since AMPHTML ads can be trusted, they can be rendered into a more performant same-origin iframe. This performance boost results in the ad rendering faster on page which translates to higher publisher revenue and better advertiser ROI.

Experiment results from GPT.js rendering AMPHTML ads in a same-origin vs cross-origin iframe

AMPHTML ads on AMP pages deliver even better ROI

An AMPHTML ad delivered to an AMP page has better performance compared to the same ad running on a regular web page. This is due to the inherent design of AMPHTML ads outlined here, giving advertisers better click through rates and viewability.

AMP pages have seen steady growth over the past few years and advertisers now have access to well over 1 billion impressions/day worth of premium (from a user experience & ad experience standpoint) inventory. In addition, more than 35 percent of ads served to AMP pages are already AMPHTML ads.

Publishers and Advertisers seeing success with AMP pages and AMPHTML ads

The news publisher EL PAIS partnered with Volkswagen, one of their advertisers, to run a multivariate A/B test measuring how Volkswagen’s display ads created in AMPHTML vs HTML5 would perform on AMP vs regular pages.

Simply moving from a standard HTML page to an AMP page (with the same HTML5 ad) resulted in a 26 percent CTR increase. Moving further to an AMP page with AMPHTML ads resulted in an additional 48 percent CTR increase.

Increase in performance metrics when combining AMP pages with AMPHTML ads

You can read the full case study here.

Getting started with AMPHTML ads for advertisers

AMPHTML ads are a subset of the AMP spec and ships with many good-by-default ads UI components, an analytics measurement framework, a spam detection system, viewability measurement and other building blocks to create a good and measurable ad.

We encourage you to read more about the benefits of using AMPHTML ads, but if you want to jump ahead to start creating them, this is a good place to begin.

Once you have created the ad, you can choose one of the following options to serve AMPHTML ads: 

1. Work with an Authorized Buyer that allows to target just AMP or regular inventory 
   
2. Use Google Ads to target inventory in the Google Display Network
   
3. Direct buy with publishers using Google Ad Manager
   
4. [Coming Soon] Display & Video 360 support to deliver AMPHTML ads to AMP pages
   

Google continues to invest in delivering better user ad experiences by increasing the share of AMPHTML ads vs regular ads. Once mobile app support launches in Q2, 2019, advertisers can fully transition to creating a single AMPHTML ad and have it render across all environments and devices.

We hope you’ll take full advantage of the performance, security benefits and the increased ROI by choosing to build & serve AMPHTML ads in your next campaign.

Posted by Vamsee Jasti, AMP Product Manager at Google

Volkswagen and EL PAÍS increase conversions by 76% with the first end-to-end AMP campaign

Volkswagen, one of the world’s largest automotive companies, sought to improve the user experience of potential customers for their 2019 Tiguan TDI 150 R Line. Given their business goals and desire to test the state-of-the-art in speed and performance, they decided to test AMP technology for both their landing page, and the ad  creatives that would drive users there.

EL PAÍS, a company within the Prisa Group, is the world’s leading Spanish-language news medium, in its digital format. It has 64.7 million unique users per month worldwide. Digital transformation is key to Prisa’s business, and they maintain a position at the forefront of digital innovation.

EL PAÍS was an early adopter of AMP technology, launching their first AMP version of EL PAÍS in 2015. They have been using this technology since then, to serve fast high-quality content to their large audience on mobile. Similarly, EL PAÍS was one of the first adopters globally of AMPHTML ads (ad creatives built with AMP).

Objective

Many news and entertainment publishers already use AMP to deliver beautiful, fast pages to end users across devices. However, the creatives that serve to these pages are typically built with standard HTML, which tend to result in degraded performance and therefore lower ROI for advertisers.

Volkswagen and EL PAÍS, together with the creative agency DDB, media agency PHD, and with the support of Google, have conducted a test to evaluate the benefits of AMPHTML ads.

The Test

EL PAÍS conducted the experiment by configuring four different line items in their ad server, featuring a 2×2 combination of environment (AMP vs. non-AMP) and creative type (AMPHTML vs. HTML). This allowed them to compare the performance characteristics of the AMPHTML creative and its original HTML equivalent, both in an AMP environment and within traditional mobile Web. Additionally, they tested two flavors of landing pages (HTML and AMP), allowing for a full comparison of results throughout the conversion funnel.

Results

After collecting data from more than 2M impressions on mobile devices, AMP technology has shown strong performance increases relative to standard HTML:

• AMP pages and ads versus standard HTML pages and ads
  • +87% CTR
  • +36% viewability rate
  • +81% visits to landing page
• AMP Landing Page relative to standard HTML Landing Page
  • +76% conversion rate
  • -43% cost per acquisition

Simply moving from a standard HTML page to an AMP page (with the same standard HTML ad) resulted in a 26% CTR increase. Moving further to an AMP page with an AMPHTML ad resulted in an additional 48% CTR increase.

The AMP page also add an extra +76% Cvr versus the standard HTML page.

Conclusions

Prisa’s test demonstrated that AMP’s superior performance characteristics can deliver meaningful ROI benefits to advertisers. Improved viewability and conversion rates result in lower user acquisition costs, and the benefit is multiplied when AMP pages and AMPHTML ads are deployed together. And not only does AMP provide positive ROI for publishers and advertisers, it does it while improving the end user experience, yielding a more sustainable web for everyone.

Posted by Pilar Sanchez, Mobile Specialist, Google

AMP Conf 2019 が東京で開催されます

この記事は AMP プロジェクト マーケティング リード、Matt Ludwig による Accelerated Mobile Pages Project の記事 “Announcing AMP Conf 2019: Tokyo” を元に翻訳・加筆したものです。詳しくは元記事をご覧ください。

昨年 2 月アムステルダムにて AMP というオープンソースプロジェクトの最新情報や学びを共有すべく AMP Conf 2018 が開催され、400 名もの方々が集まりました。この AMP というフレームワークはそれ以降も進化のスピードを止めることはなく、新たなガバナンスモデルを導入し、多くのパブリッシャーや E コマースのウェブサイトに採用され続けています。その中でも注目すべきははアジア・パシフィックでの普及です。たとえば最近の事例では、インドのパブリッシャーである Times of India やオーストラリアの自動車保険の Greenslips.co.au そして日本の CMS の EC-CUBE など、この地域での盛り上がりには目を見張るものがあります。

AMP Conf 2019 はついに東京へ！

このような盛り上がりを受けて、2019 年の AMP Conf は 4 月 17 日、18 日に東京で開催することが決定されました。AMP のコアデベロッパーやコントリビューター、AMP を利用してサイト制作をしているエンジニアやデザイナー、そして新たなガバナンスモデルを形成しているコミッティーのメンバーと一緒に、AMP の最新情報や事例を見ていきましょう。コアな AMPHTML のトピックだけでなく、AMP stories、AMP for email、AMPHTML ads などの新しいフォーマットに関するアップデートも予定されています。またすべての方に楽しんでいただけるよう、コンテンツは英語だけでなく日本語でも聞けるように通訳される予定です。

そして今年も多くの方からの声や意見を反映するため、セッションの一般募集が行われています。皆さんが取り組まれた AMP の面白い使い方や、本番環境で利用するにあたっての苦労話、開発プロセスにおける工夫や、ウェブ エコシステムの中での AMP の捉え方など、さまざまな話題をご応募ください。

AMP Conf に参加するにはこちらのフォームからお申込みください。また、数に限りはありますが、一部の支援が必要なコミュニティなどを対象とした旅費の援助も検討されていますので、ご希望の方は登録時にお申込みください。もし東京に来れない場合は、ライブストリーミングやセッション動画の公開も行われますので、AMP YouTube チャンネルに登録してください。

開催日が近づくにつれ、より詳細なトーク コンテンツが更新される予定ですので、ぜひともご確認ください。もうすぐ（あと100日以内で 😲）皆さまとお会いできることを楽しみにしています。

Reviewed by Yusuke Utsunomiya – Mobile Solutions Consultant, Google

A year of open source funding

Happy new year!!! One year ago we announced our New Year’s resolution to help the open-source ecosystem become a little bit more sustainable. This is our one year funding report. For 2019 we intend to continue on our path with significantly increased investment.

We believe it is increasingly clear that relying on people’s volunteered free time to drive mission critical open source software is not a sustainable mode of operation. As a community we need to find new ways to fund the valuable work on such projects. We strive to provide at least some financial support to projects that we directly depend on and that are accepting support.

Total funding: $32,900

The projects we supported are

Projects	Total contribution	Description
Babel	$12,600	The most used transpilation system for JavaScript. Used in AMP’s development pipeline to support modern JS syntax in older browsers.
Preact	$12,000	Super tiny React alternative. Used in AMP’s upcoming component model rework.
webpack	$6,000	The most popular build tool for web applications and core to our amp-script strategy.
document-register-element	$1,200	Document-register-element is the custom element we are using to drive AMP.
Rollup	$1,100	Rollup is a super efficient bundler for JavaScript modules.

We’re super glad we’ve been able to support these amazing projects and are looking forward to do even more in 2019!

Posted by Malte Ubl, Member of the AMP Project Technical Steering Committee

Announcing AMP Conf 2019: Tokyo

AMP Conf 2018 in Amsterdam

Last year 400 of us gathered in AMPsterdam to share the latest AMP news, and learn from the hundreds of developers engaged with the open source project. The framework has continued to evolve since our time in the Netherlands, including a new governance model and many new publishers and e-commerce websites building with AMP. In fact, we’ve seen remarkable results and growth across the Asia-Pacific region in particular. With recent examples like Indian publisher Times of India, Australian car insurance website Greenslips.co.au, and Japanese CMS EC-Cube.

AMP Conf 2019 is headed to Tokyo!

This is why we’re thrilled to invite you to join us at the next AMP Conf being held in Tokyo on April 17 and 18. Come to learn from those working on contributing to AMP, those using the format, and the new committees managing the project’s governance. Whether you speak English or Japanese, you’ll find the talks engaging as we’ll be translating all the presentations into both languages. We’ll have speakers from the web developer community, core AMP contributors and companies and websites who have implemented AMP. Additionally get the latest updates on AMP stories, AMP for email and AMPHTML ads.

We also want to continue the tradition of including the broader community voices by inviting you to submit ideas for talks. We want to hear about the most interesting things you’ve done with AMP, your challenges with AMP in production, how you’ve approached building AMP pages or how AMP’s place in the web ecosystem.

To apply for a spot at this year’s AMP Conf, fill out this registration form. You can also express interest to apply for a limited number of scholarships for those who may need travel support, especially from underrepresented communities. If you’re unable to attend in person, we’ll be recording and live streaming all of the talks, so subscribe to the AMP YouTube channel to catch those videos.

Stay tuned for details on the specific talk agenda as we get closer to the event! We look forward to seeing many of you in Tokyo in less than 100 days!

Posted by Matt Ludwig, AMP Project marketing lead at Google