by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, May 23, 2017

Google made several major search announcements Tuesday at its Marketing Next 2017 event. The first brings the speed of Accelerated Mobile Pages project to search and display advertising, and the second extends in-market audience targeting to search campaigns.

A new AdWords beta that allows marketers to use fast-loading AMP pages as the landing pages for search ads, and the other change involves speeding up the ads served across the Google Display Network by using the same technology that makes AMP pages fast.

A one-second delay in mobile page load times can decrease conversion rates up to 20%, according to Google. A report released by SOASTA in April with similar findings found that pages visited by shoppers who made a purchase loaded 26% faster than those that did not.

When advertisers link their search ads to AMP landing pages, consumers will get a faster mobile Web experience.

Google also will automatically convert display ads to AMP running on the Google Display Network after discovering the ads load up to five seconds faster than standard display ads.

Prior to last week, the median page load time for an AMP page from Google Search was less than one second, and now these pages run twice as fast. About 2 billion AMP pages have been published from 900,000 domains including Johnson & Johnson, Toll Brothers and eBay.

The changes to in-market audiences targeting means that advertisers will have the ability to target consumers based on purchase intent signals in search campaigns for more than 12 categories.

The in-market audiences feature, currently only available for Display Network and YouTube campaigns, will come to search campaigns.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

(36)