Add AMP Ads To Your Accelerated Mobile Pages

Kevel has long believed that most ads are terrible, which is why we've spent years helping publishers find innovative ways to drive more digital revenue, whether that’s building unobtrusive native ads, seamless sponsored listings, or fast server-side ads.

Today we’re happy to announce an additional product that'll help publishers deliver better ad experiences: client-rendered AMPHTML ads.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a novel open-source tech led by The AMP Project that helps speed up mobile web pages (which includes both page load and ad load times). Indeed, AMPHTML ads are 6x faster than regular ads on the same pages.

Kevel's partnership with the AMP Project enables publishers to speed up their AMPHTML ads even more by migrating all the markup to the client and returning a simple JSON ad from the server to minimize the amount of data being passed.

Cached templates remove the middleman

3rd-party proxies like Cloudflare partner with the AMP Project to digitally sign AMPHTML creatives, ensuring only approved ads are rendered. This ability to validate any random AMP html is very valuable to keeping AMPHTML ads safe and fast.

However, many creatives are pretty standard across publishers, so the AMP Project and Kevel have partnered to create ad templates that can be cached by the browser. Since these templates will be pre-approved by AMP, there's no need for that 3rd-party validation step. Instead, the browser can connect directly with Kevel, who will then send data about the winning ad back to the AMP cache for instertion into the template.

By bypassing the 3rd-party proxy step, this process can decrease ad load times and lead to faster pages.

JSON ad integration

The Kevel AMPHTML ad process works like this:

1. Kevel builds a creative template that includes all markups (ad size, click URL, title, etc)
2. The AMP Project pulls this down, validates it, and caches it in the browser
3. Publishers send Kevel an ad request using an <amp-ad> tag
4. Kevel's Decision API returns JSON data about the winning ad (such as size, click URL, etc), including what template to use
5. The AMP Project inserts this data dynamically into the right template

In this scenario, the browser doesn't need to download any markup because it's already cached.

Since the amount of data being sent it less, this process greatly speeds up the loading of the AMPHTML ad!

Benefits of AMP ads

1. No third-party JavaScript needed
2. All rendering is done client-side
3. Payload is reduced by over 50%
4. Templates can be cached in amp-cache

These benefits lead to better user experiences thanks to the quick page load times. Additionally, since the ad appears even faster, the ad request is not likely to time-out, leading to more impressions, clicks, and revenue.

If you're interested in learning more about Kevel's AMP capabilities, please reach out to us here.