Why People Fret Over Push Notification Open Rates
It’s time to focus on engagement. It’s the true measure of your users’ behaviour and how they react to your messages. That’s why Taplytics gives you the proper tools to analyze your push notification strategy and get real results.
Everybody has that one friend who reads your messages but never replies, and thanks to read receipts, you can catch them in the act. But is it really the open status of the message you care about? When you sent the message, you didn’t want them to just open it; you wanted them to take action and reply or follow up somehow.
At Taplytics, we like to think about push notifications the same way.
An open rate is Just a Number
The majority of articles aimed at helping you improve your push notification strategy all focus on open rate:
“7 surprising facts about open rates for push notifications”
“Here’s a guaranteed way to boost push notifications opens”
“Study says emojis will boost push notification open rates”
Knowing how many users opened your message is great, but how do you know if your users are like your friend who opens your message in the interest of staying in the loop and clearing their notification tray? On the other hand, does an unopened notification always signify a disengaged user?
It is in your best interest to focus on your user engagement alongside open rate. That’s why we have re-focused our push notification analytics to help you understand how a push notification has actually impacted a user, regardless of whether or not they interact with it.
Measuring Push Notification Engagement
Engagement Metric: Users who engage with your app within 24 hours of receiving a push notification.
When you send push notifications with Taplytics, your result reports use engagement as the primary metric. There are three types of users to be aware of when analyzing your results:
- Tested users: Those who received a notification.
- Active users: Those who have used the app within the past 90 days.
- Baseline users: Active users who did not receive the notification or can not because they have disabled push notifications.
This visual comparison demonstrates if push notifications are driving engagement. Looking at the example above, the green shows what percent of users engaged with the app if they received a notification. The grey shows what percent of active users engaged with the app if they did not receive a notification.
We only compare push engagement rates to the activity of users active within 90 days. If we included users who were last active more than 90 days ago, the comparison would be very biased in favour of the group who received the push. This is because users who haven’t recently been active in the app are less likely to engage with it, regardless of if they receive a notification or not. Making realistic comparisons will help you identify your notifications’ true impact on engagement.
This new reporting standard is held to all campaigns, recurring pushes, experiments and transactional pushes created with Taplytics to make your data humanly understandable. Once you identify if your push notifications were impactful or not, you can continue to experiment and create iterations of your pushes to define which variables impact user engagement like the text, inclusion of images or time sent.
Here’s to the Metrics that Matter.
Many app users do not open push notifications, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging with your app. Our new way of analyzing push allows our customers to truly understand user behaviour and the impact of their push notifications.
This is just one way we help make the world’s best mobile teams make better-informed decisions and see real results. Get in touch to talk about your push notification strategy.
Looking for some push notification guidance? There are so many elements that drive engagement within a push notification, which is why we tested over 100 apps in Taplytics Labs to see how leaders in various industries are using push.
Use Taplytics Push Trends as a benchmark for your push strategy to improve engagement.
