U.S. Xpress, one of the country’s largest truckload carriers, is leveraging new technologies to transform how carriers operate every aspect of its company. U.S. Xpress has become the first carrier in the industry to use Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology to optimize its recruitment websites and application process for truck drivers and potential hires using mobile devices. After running a 20-day test period, the company‘s AMP-enabled landing pages loaded five times faster and generated a 62 percent increase in completed job applications when compared to the performance of identical non-AMP landing pages. As a result, U.S. Xpress plans to fully implement AMP technology across all of its recruiting platforms in 2018, which the company believes could achieve a projected cost savings of up to $1 million per year or more in recruitment costs.
“One of the biggest challenges the trucking industry faces today is the growing shortage of drivers, and our industry has to find ways to improve our ability to recruit and hire drivers so we can meet the increasing shipping demands of our customers,” said Eric Fuller, CEO of U.S. Xpress. “The reality is current recruitment websites are not always mobile friendly and often struggle with loading job applications in a timely manner. With more and more potential applicants using their mobile devices to apply for jobs, this is just not acceptable, especially if a carrier wants to remain competitive in how they recruit new drivers to their company.
“Google’s AMP technology is a big deal for the mobile web. Leveraging this technology allows U.S. Xpress to cater its recruiting websites for the mobile user with pages that load in a tenth of a second and deliver a better overall browsing experience. All of this means U.S. Xpress can deliver job offers to drivers at incredible speeds, which in turn, allows us to hire significantly more drivers and reduce our annual recruitment costs.”
Each year, more and more truck drivers and potential hires are using their phones and other mobile devices to access and complete a job application. Unfortunately, this can be a tedious and frustrating task to a point where people often choose to abandon the process before completing the necessary forms. To help overcome this challenge, The Johnson Group took Google’s AMP technology into a new application space and helped U.S. Xpress revolutionize its online recruitment efforts so truck drivers and potential hires could quickly and easily complete a job application on their mobile device.
After running a 20-day test on one of its key recruiting websites, U.S. Xpress realized a significant difference in the conversion rates and cost-per-application when directing people to an AMP-enabled landing page versus an identical non-AMP landing page. Officials with The Johnson Group attributed this difference to the amount of time a mobile browser takes to load a page. While the non-AMP landing page frequently struggled to load – in same cases taking more than a minute – the AMP-enabled page loaded five times faster and was viewable almost instantaneously. As a result, the AMP-enabled landing page generated a 62 percent increase in completed job applications compared to what the non-Amp landing page converted.
Launched by Google in February 2016, AMP technology is an open-source framework that’s focuses on putting mobile performance first by allowing web publishers to create mobile-optimized content that loads instantly on all mobile devices. Basically, AMP technology uses the same design code to work across multiple platforms and devices so the website’s content can appear everywhere instantly – no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device a person is using. By doing this, companies can provide a better mobile experience for its users and get information to them as fast as possible.
Industry research has shown higher bounce rates are often associated with slower-loading web pages. This research also shows for every second that passes for a page to load, the website typically sees a 7 percent decline in their conversion rates. By using AMP technology, the median load time for AMP-coded web page is 0.7 seconds. In comparison, the median load time for non-AMP pages is 22 seconds.
“AMP technology is new open source initiative that makes the mobile web awesome again. Research shows 40 percent of users will leave a page if it does not load within three seconds. By using AMP, page load speed and the mobile-readiness are never an issue for your website is truly mobile friendly, meaning the webpage appears to load instantly on your mobile device,” said Paul Bakaus, the developer advocate for AMP technology at Google.