Speed is everything in a digital world where consumers are said to have the attention span of goldfish and likely to abandon a search or website if information is not accessible in seconds.
In addition, they are often in the moment on mobile where distractions can be greater and time even tighter.
Musement, a discovery and booking platform for activities owned by TUI, decided to tackle the problem with the support of Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It claims users are now able to navigate Musement’s mobile site 70% faster.
Here it lays out the challenges and describes how AMP has helped the brand address the problems.
AMP, developed by Google and part of the OpenJS Foundation since last October, is an open‐source project that provides a simple and robust format to ensure websites are fast, user‐first and generate revenue.
With tickets for tours and attractions in more than 1,000 destinations in 70 countries, Musement sought to find ways to make it easier and faster for people to find relevant activities, to drive click-through and conversion rates and improve the return on investment and margin per sale.
From zero to R&D hero
At Musement, we are constantly looking for new ways to improve our offering; to make it easier and faster for people to find our events and attractions.
The AMP project initially started as an research and development initiative, which transpired during one of our "Tech Fridays" (we invest 20% of developer time in R&D with our tech, design and product teams).
We wanted to explore the impact faster page loading times would have on click-through rate and ultimately conversion rate. We decided to test AMP, an open‐source project that helps to create web pages that load quickly.
The first prototype was a "City" AMP page, with the aim of providing a faster loading time, especially to our mobile customers.
The first step was a site analysis to compare existing performance against AMP.
Early testing indicated the positive impact of AMP. Although previous improvements by our team had reduced the full‐page load time of our venue pages to 8.6 seconds, creating the same page in AMP slashed the load time to just 1.8 seconds.
Upon analysis of these results, we pushed development of AMP across all mobile traffic in a relatively short period of time.
The team worked to automate the rollout of AMP using Vue.JS, an open source JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single‐page applications. AMP was implemented on top of our front-end framework in order to reuse our web component as much as possible.
Mobile metrics
The support we received from Google throughout the process from both a tech and marketing side was second to none. AMP enabled us to drastically improve the user experience on Musement for mobile devices.
By making the experience both faster and smoother, we were able to see significant improvements in nearly all metrics.
A/B testing showed that the AMP pages not only increased page speed but they delivered a 15% better conversion rate. AMP also boosted our average revenue per visit by 27%, an outcome we had not anticipated.
The team at Musement also greatly contribute to the success of any project we implement as they positively adapt to change and strive for the best user experience possible.
Progressive thinking
The biggest learning outcome from this project is to always try new things. As a business, we strive to adapt and provide cutting-edge technology to our customers and visitors to our page.
R&D is so important to us and we will continue to award time and place importance on this to ensure we are at the forefront of technology.
We remain excited about the future of AMP as we now plan to move our entire purchase funnel to AMP for paid marketing campaigns.
We are also extending to Progressive Web App technology combined with AMP.
Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that are more reliable (load instantly even in uncertain network conditions), faster (respond quickly to user interactions) and more engaging (an immersive user experience similar to an App).
Progressive Web Apps combined with AMP will allow us to further improve the site performance and user experience.