Push Notifications

This section allows you to create and manage push notifications campaigns.

• If push notifications are not connected

• Current campaigns

• Creating a new campaign

• Push notification report (Simple campaign)

• Push notification report (Automated campaign)

If push notifications are not connected

To connect the push notifications service to the app you need to:

1. Integrate devtodev SDK and activate push notifications during integration.

2. Fill in the required information in the push notifications panel in the Integration section of the application settings.

Please note that access to the Integration section is restricted by user access rights.

Check the Integration section for detailed information about the process of receiving necessary data and activating push notifications for each platform:

Push notifications

Push notifications section review

Current campaigns

Here is the list of created push notification campaigns. You can filter them by status. Select one of the campaigns to view a more detailed report.

General report

The report shows notification settings, such as campaign and audience info, statistics about campaign results, where:

• Audience – the number of users who fit selected conditions and whose push tokens are known.

• Delivered – the number of delivered push notifications, which haven’t been declined by the push server. The most common reasons for rejection are that app is uninstalled or the token is not correct.

• Failures – the number of rejected push notifications (the difference between the number of audience and delivered push notifications). Common failure reasons: push notifications are restricted on the device; the app is deleted or re-installed; push token is outdated.

• Impressions – the number of impressions. This metric exists only for Android apps. The data come to us if the user opens the app or if it was opened at the time of receiving the push notification.

• Clicks – the amount of clicks on a notification.

Creating a new campaign

To create a new campaign click the Add new campaign button in the top right corner and follow the steps:

1. Campaign name

2. Campaign type

3. Target audience or Triggering conditions

4. Push notification content

5. Push testing

6. Settings for campaign analysis

7. Schedule

8. Confirmation

Name your push campaign

Campaign types

Select the type of the campaign. There are two types of campaign: Simple campaign and Automated campaign.

Choose Simple campaign to send a message to a specific segment of users or all users. You can send the push once or schedule it to a specific time, let’s say, every Thursday at 12:00. You can use it to notify all users about a new event in the game, or notify a specific segment about a new promotion available, etc.

Choose Automated campaign (Trigger campaign) if you want to send more personal push notifications or when you want to regularly remind users about the application, e.g. when a user has performed a certain action or has not opened the application for a while.

Target audience / Triggering conditions

When creating a Simple campaign, at the Target audience step you can select the delivery target audience. You can include all the users whose push tokens were received by devtodev system or target a specific audience by using filter conditions.

When creating an Automated campaign (Trigger campaign), at the Triggering conditions step, you must specify one of the triggers that will launch the campaign.

• First open: specify the number of days/hours/minutes that have to pass after the application was first opened. For example, you can remind a new user about a time-limited starter pack 2 days after the app was first opened.

You can filter users by country of origin, language, device, application version, OS version:

• Inactivity: specify the number of days since the user's last activity. You can also set specific filters to select users you want to message, for example, you can select the users who used to pay in the application, but were not active for two weeks.

  
• Event: specify one or several events that the user must perform in order to receive a push notification. You can specify the number of days/hours/minutes that should elapse after the conditions of the trigger are met, or you can select Cancellation events. Cancellation event is a condition that prevents notifications from being dispatched if the condition is met within a specified delay period. For example, if you want to re-engage users who abandoned the cart, you can indicate opening a store and adding a specific product to the cart as a trigger and then select the product purchase event as a Cancellation event.

You can send push notification to every user who allows it or choose a particular segment.

Push notification content

As for the customization of the content, you can add action, button and attachment (image, music or video). If you need to send a notification in different languages, you can click the Add button and customise content for each language separately.

You can specify a text message for the default language, and also add other languages with different messages. When sending a notification, the user will receive a push message in the language specified in the user profile. If the language in the user profile is not among the added languages, the user will receive a notification in the default language.

Moreover, you can make the notification invisible. Such notifications will be received only by your application. You can use invisible notifications to send parameters to activate one of the app’s features.

Check these articles on how to configure notification content for different platforms:

Android NotificationsIOS NotificationsWindows Notifications

Check this article for notification button templates:

Button Templates

Push testing

This is an optional step.

You can preview a push notification on real devices before sending it to the audience. You can send a push notification to your test devices, or a set of devices with corresponding advertising IDs.

The filters selected in the Target audience step will not be applied to your selected test devices.

Settings for campaign analysis

If you want to get a more detailed analysis on your push campaign, you can set the size of the control group. The control group consists of users who meet the conditions of the campaign, but do not receive push notifications. The control group is useful if you want to know the effectiveness of notifications or to compare the metric values of users who received them and those who didn’t.

For the push campaign you can also set a desired action (Conversion event) that the user needs to take after receiving the notification. For example, if a push notification informs the user about new items in the store, then the desired action is to open the store screen. If the push informs the user about bargain price offers, then the desired action will be the purchase of the offer, etc.

Setting the Conversion event will allow you to compare the conversion rate of the control group (users who do not receive the notification) with the conversion rate of the audience that receives the notification. It also allows you to compare the conversion rate of the users who opened the message and performed the target action with those who did not open it but still performed the target action.

Schedule

The next step is to schedule a campaign.

Simple campaign.

Here you can choose between two options – Send ASAP or Schedule sending time.

• Send ASAP – the push notification will be sent once you complete the campaign creation process.

• Schedule sending time – set specific parameters for sending the notification. For example, you can choose up to 30 calendar days when you would like to send the same push notification or you can select just one day if it is not a recurring message. Then you can select a delivery time and timezone: the push notification can be sent simultaneously to all users or according to the user's time zone.

Automated (trigger) campaign

A trigger campaign’s Schedule step offers the following settings:

Campaign activity. Specify the start and finish date of the campaign. To start the campaign you can choose between two options – Send ASAP or Schedule sending time. If you choose Send ASAP then the push notification will be sent once you complete the campaign creation process. As a finish date, you can choose between two options – Never or Schedule sending time.

Delivery settings. You can tick the checkbox if you want to prohibit sending a delayed message after the campaign has expired. In the Delivery time window, select the time interval for the delivery of your message. Specify whether or not the notification should be sent at the next allowed time window if the trigger condition is met outside the specified period.

Expiration. Specify the period after which a push notification will be canceled if the device was unavailable. Usually, if possible, messages are delivered immediately, but if the user's device was disconnected from the Internet or turned off, the notification is saved on the server and is sent when it becomes possible. If you did not specify the message lifetime, the default settings will be applied. You can also limit the number of notifications sent per period, for example, send no more than one message in four days.

For example, if you have specified the message’s lifetime for the iOS platform then APNs stores the notification and tries to deliver it at least once, repeating the attempt as needed until the specified date. If the value is 0, APNs attempts to deliver the notification only once and doesn’t store it. Apple documentation link. FCM messages. Requests that don't contain this field default to the maximum period of four weeks. More information. Windows Push Notification Services. By default, tile and badge notifications expire three days after being downloaded. When a notification expires, the content is removed from the tile or queue and is no longer shown to the user. More information here.

Copying an existing campaign

You easily can create a copy of an existing push campaign. Open the campaign that you would like to duplicate and click on the Copy icon in the upper right corner.

This will copy all of the settings of this campaign, you just need to give it a new name and save.

Push notification Advanced report (Simple campaign)

The Advanced report is made up of several widgets:

• Campaign info – general information about the sent message: title, text, action, sound, audience filter and etc.

• Campaign statistics

• Monetization effect

• User structure

• User return

• Conversion funnel

Based on the widget data you can divide the audience of the campaign into the following segments:

• Number of users in the control group, if you specified it when configuring the campaign

• Number of users who received the push notification but did not open it

• Number of users who received and opened the push notification

These segments will allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your message. All metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of notifications are measured 7 days before the start of the advertising campaign and 7 days after the receipt of the notification.

Campaign statistics. Audience is the number of users who entered the segment when creating the campaign. The table contains a Gross value for each segment of the audience, seven days before the start of the campaign and seven days after the start to assess the impact of push notifications on user behavior. Conversion to action shows the percentage of users that have executed the desired action.

Monetization effect. You can assess how the campaign has affected metrics such as ARPPU, ARPU, Avg. ARPDAU, Conversion to 1st payment, Conversion to 2nd payment. Based on the metric values you can also build a graph where the red line marks the start of the campaign.

User structure. You can analyze the following metrics: Users, Average Session Length, ARPPU, ARPU, Revenue. Group audiences by Country, Paying capacity, days from Install.

User return. The widget shows the number of users by their inactivity periods in the application and the number of re-engaged users (within 7 days after the campaign).

Conversion Funnels. If you specified the desired action (Conversion event) while configuring the campaign, the funnel will consist of three steps:

1. The first step of the funnel contains the campaign start event (push sent).

2. The second step is opening the push notification event (push click).

3. The third step is the event you specified when configuring your advertising campaign (conversion event).

If you want to add another stage or change the current stages, you can recreate the funnel in the Funnel report.

Push notification report (Automated campaign)

Statistics

In the Automated (trigger) campaign report you can find information about the campaign settings, its status and widgets with statistics. You can also cancel sending push notifications for this campaign or restart it.

Above the report, you can specify a date range for which you want to display data. A trigger push campaign report has three tabs:

• Base report – general information about the campaign.

• Advanced report – information about the number of users who re-engage after receiving notifications, information about the effectiveness of push notifications and conversion funnels if you specified a conversion event when setting up the campaign.

• Efficiency report – on this tab you can see how the campaign affected the monetization metrics.

Each tab contains general information about the campaign:

• Average number of campaign notifications per user

• Average number of all push notifications received by campaign audience. This information can be useful in determining what proportion of notifications a user receives during a given campaign. For example, during this campaign, the user only receives push notifications, in which case you can diversify notifications for this audience.

• Average time between push notification campaigns. This metric helps you measure how often users receive notifications from a given campaign.

• Number of delivered push notifications that were not opened

• Number of errors

In the Number of days for analysis after the push notification has been sent out drop-down list below, you can specify your push notification’s period of validity from 1 to 7 days. All metrics for evaluating notification effectiveness will be calculated depending on the specified period. For example, if you choose a seven-day period, then in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign, the metrics will be calculated for 7 days before the start of the campaign and for 7 days after the push notification has been received. A similar timeframe will be set for the marketing funnel stages.

In the next Display statistics for the * push notification(s) drop-down list, you can select the number of the notification “wave” for which you want to view the statistics.

Base report tab

The widget displays the number of sent, opened push notifications, and the conversion from sending to opening. In the controls, you can choose the push notification on which you want to view statistics, for example, on the second or on all at once.

Advanced report tab

User return. If the Inactivity trigger was added when setting up the campaign, this report will contain the Return widget. The Return widget displays the number of users with a breakdown by the time since their last engagement with the application and the number of users re-engaged due to the campaign. This widget allows you to estimate the optimal time for re-engaging lapsed users.

Conversion Funnels. This report contains a funnel widget if you specified the desired action (Conversion event) when setting up the campaign. The funnel shows the sequence of user actions and allows you to assess at what stage users “drop out” and do not reach the desired action point.

The funnel has three stages:

1. The first stage of the funnel contains the campaign start event (push sent).

2. The second stage is the push notification open event (push click).

3. The third stage is the event that you specified when setting up the ad campaign (conversion event).

If you want to add another stage or change the current stages, you can recreate the funnel in the Funnel report.

The effectiveness of sending push notifications. This widget contains information on the number of push notifications sent in the first wave, the number of notifications opened, the number of push notifications sent and opened in the second wave, and so on. Using the widget, you can assess the effectiveness of the initial and subsequent notifications sent during this campaign.

For example, it is possible that users open the first push notification, but don’t open the subsequent ones. In this case, sending a reminder that does not re-engage the player is useless. It might be worth changing the content, the call to action, in subsequent messages first.

Efficiency report tab

Monetization effect. You can evaluate the impact of the campaign on such metrics as ARPPU, ARPU, Avg. ARPDAU, Conversion to 1st payment, Conversion to 2nd payment. You can also put these metrics into a graph form and display them below the table (the red line stands for the start of the campaign).

User structure. You can analyze the following metrics: users, Average Session Length, ARPPU, ARPU, Revenue, segment the audience by Country, Paying capacity, Days from install.

Errors

In some cases, you can encounter errors that occurred while sending push notifications for the specific campaign in the Status column.

Below you can find examples of possible errors and their meaning.

Android

Code	Meaning
Http code: 502 Bad Gateway Http code: 500 Internal Server Error	There was an error with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) when sending the message, which is out of our control. Unfortunately it is possible that some users did not receive the notification.
Connection reset by peer Сonnection timed out: fcm.googleapis.com fcm.googleapis.com SSLEngine closed already	There were temporary network issues during the process of sending your push campaign, which we cannot influence. Unfortunately it is possible that some users did not receive the notification.

IOS

Code	Meaning
Channel closed before HTTP/2 preface completed. Channel closed before HTTP/2 preface completed. Handshake timed out Connection reset by peer	There were temporary network issues during the process of sending your push campaign, which we cannot influence. Unfortunately it is possible that some users did not receive the notification.
Your APNS certificate is not valid. Please update it	Your APNS certificate is not valid. Update this under Settings -> Push notifications

Windows

Code	Meaning
Http code: 410 Gone	The token of some users selected in the audience has expired, they will not receive a notification.
wns2-by3p.notify.windows.com: Name or service not known wns2-par02p.notify.windows.com: Temporary failure in name resolution SSLEngine closed already Handshake timed out with different prefixes, e.g. connection timed out: wns2-ch1p.notify.windows.com/20.25.245.136:443	There were temporary network issues during the process of sending your push campaign, which we cannot influence. Unfortunately it is possible that some users did not receive the notification.