A new algorithm reduced Deliveroo delivery times in the UK by 20%

"Food delivery startup Deliveroo claims it has reduced its delivery times by 20% with a new algorithm called "Frank".
The London-headquartered company, which is now competing with Amazon Restaurants and UberEats, announced on Wednesday that Frank has enabled it to reduce its average delivery time to 29 minutes in the UK.
A spokesperson for UberEats claimed the average time for one of its deliveries in the UK is 28 minutes but Deliveroo would likely question whether its couriers are indeed faster on average.
Deliveroo said Frank uses machine learning — a technology that allows software to become more accurate in predicting outcomes without being explicitly programmed — to evaluate the most efficient way of distributing orders based on the location of restaurants, riders, and customers.
The algorithm can also tell Deliveroo's 10,000 UK restaurants how long it will take them to prepare a meal based on the time of the day and the type of order, Deliveroo said. Deliveroo claims that its 15,000 UK riders are benefiting from Frank because it allows them to complete more deliveries per hour and earn more money."

Source:  Business Insider, 26th July 2017

Cutting ad load times boosts ad revenue

"Cutting down the amount of code on its webpages has helped Meredith make more revenue per visitor.
Meredith, which publishes women’s lifestyle titles including Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, began an audit of its code a year ago. This led it to remove several vendors and shift code from browsers to servers. The code audit helped Meredith speed up its ad-rendering times by 15-20 percent across desktop and mobile, which, along with an increase in native advertising, contributed to a 20 percent increase in revenue per visit, said Matt Minoff, Meredith’s chief digital officer.
The results were especially dramatic on mobile, where Meredith gets about 60 percent of its traffic and where speed is especially important: There, getting ads to load faster helped drive a 74 percent increase in revenue per visit. Meredith wouldn’t share raw numbers."

Source:  Digiday, 21st June 2017

Visitors spend approx 35% more time with pages that use Google AMP

"Chartbeat says visitors to web pages that load with Google AMP are spending 35 percent more time with that content on average than with standard mobile web pages.
On average, visitors spend 48.2 seconds with pages found through Google search that load with AMP, compared to 35.6 seconds on average with standard mobile pages found through search.
That means pages that load with accelerated mobile pages software (that’s what AMP stands for) are more valuable to advertisers, because visitors that spend more time with content spend more time scrolling through ads."

Source:  Recode, 5th June 2017

Faster mobile ads are much more effective

"According to research released today by Google and Teads, the video tech company, mobile publishers using Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) video inventory perform better than those that stick with the traditional mobile web.
Results showed publishers using AMP, an open-source Google initiative, saw clickthrough rates increase by 200 percent, completion rates increase by 15 percent and ad performance increase 18 percent. Nearly 100 publishers are now using AMP including Mashable, Rodale, L'Express and Trinity Mirror.
In a blog post detailing the findings, Eric Shih, global svp of business development at Teads, said videos by brands and publishers don't just need to be fast, they also should "engage, educate and entertain."
"If you've ever waited impatiently for your favorite site to load only to watch an annoying pop-up take over your smartphone screen, you can probably understand why user engagement decreases," Shih wrote. "That type of experience doesn't unlock the full potential of video advertising."
This year, Google and Facebook have both made big pushes to speed up the web by cutting down on ad sizes and load times. In September, a few months after Google launched its AMP program, Facebook announced it would start helping advertisers decrease load times while also potentially not delivering ads that were too big if a user's internet connection couldn't handle them."

Source:  AdWeek - 2nd December 2016