Push

Send push notifications to the people who should get them. Build a campaign's audience, schedule and message in one editor, then read what each one delivered.

What a push campaign is

A push campaign is one message plus three decisions about it: who receives it, when it goes out, and what it says. You make all three in one editor, launch it, and then read what happened on the campaign's own results page.

Push sits under Experience in the top bar. Everything below happens on that page or in the editor it opens.

The first decision is the Type, because it decides which of the others you still have to make.

• One-time delivers once, immediately or at a scheduled time.
• Recurring repeats on a schedule, daily, weekly or monthly.
• Multi-day delivers on a custom list of specific dates.
• Automated is triggered by profile behavior, like cohort entry or an event.
• API is triggered by your own server. It has no schedule and no audience targeting, because both come from the call.

The message itself is a separate record from the campaign that sends it. That is why the Content step opens by asking whether to design something new or attach a push content you already have.

Saving without launching leaves the campaign as a draft. A draft has no results and cannot be opened from the list's results button, so nothing has been sent until you launch.

Who can receive a push

Two things decide whether a person can be reached at all, and both sit outside the message you write.

The first is the project's push credentials. The editor offers only the platforms this project has credentials for, and when there are none it says so and refuses to continue: "No push credentials are configured. Add your platform credentials in the project settings to send push notifications."

The second is the device. Estimated reach counts a profile only when it is registered for push on one of the platforms this campaign selected, so somebody whose app never asked them for permission is not in the number.

This is why Estimated reach is worth reading before you launch. It is normally smaller than the audience your targeting describes, and a reach of zero is the clearest signal there is that something upstream is wrong, however well the targeting is written.

From there, targeting narrows the audience rather than widening it. Cohorts, profile properties and geolocation all apply together, so each one you add can only make the number smaller.

Use Cases

Send a one-time push

Get one message out to everyone who can receive it.

1. Open Experience, then Push, and select New push.
2. Name the campaign at the top of the editor. The name is for you and the people you work with; it is never shown on the device.
3. In Type, leave One-time selected.
4. Open Targeting and choose the platforms this message is for. Only the platforms with credentials are offered, and they are pre-selected for you.
5. Leave the audience on All profiles, then read Estimated reach at the bottom of the panel. That is how many profiles this will actually go to.
6. Open Delivery and either leave Send now or pick Schedule and a date and time. Set the delivery deadline if the message stops being worth sending after a while.
7. Select Continue, choose Create new content, and write the title and the message on the device preview. The preview is the message.
8. Select Continue again to reach Review, check the summary, and select Launch. A dialog asks you to confirm before anything is sent.

Send to a cohort and check the reach first

Send to a defined group rather than to everyone, and know how many people that is before you commit.

1. Start a new push and open Targeting.
2. Switch the audience from All profiles to Segmented, and pick one or more cohorts. A profile in any of the cohorts you pick is in the audience.
3. Narrow further if you need to. Filter by profile properties adds a condition on the profile itself, and Target by geolocation limits the audience to the locations saved for this project. Every filter you add applies on top of the others.
4. Watch Estimated reach as you go. It refreshes as you change the audience and the platforms, and it counts only the profiles that can receive a push.
5. If the number is smaller than you expected, take one filter off at a time and watch which one caused the drop.

Automated campaigns target the same way, with one addition: they also need a trigger, which is either entering a cohort, leaving one, or performing an event. You can also decide what happens when the trigger condition is no longer true by the time the message would go out, either send it anyway or cancel it.

Test a message before you launch it

See the real thing on a real device before anyone else does.

1. Compose the message, then select Continue to reach Review.
2. Read the summary column. It states the project, the type, the platforms, the content, the audience, the delivery and the deadline in one place, and the preview beside it shows the notification itself. A recurring or multi-day campaign also lists the days it will go out on, so you can check the schedule here rather than stepping back to Setup.
3. Select Send test. It delivers what you have composed right now to this project's test users, without saving the campaign, and reports how many devices it reached. If any failed, it tells you how many.
4. Fix anything the test showed and send another. Nothing is saved between tests.
5. When you are happy, either Save as draft to come back to it, or Launch to put it in the lifecycle.

Two things about that last step. If your project requires approval for push messages, the button reads Send for approval instead of Launch, and the campaign waits at Pending approval until somebody decides. And once a campaign has started sending, its type, targeting and delivery are frozen: you can still edit the name and the content, but not who it goes to or when. Duplicate is the way to reuse a campaign whose targeting you want to change.

See how a campaign did

Find out whether a message that has gone out did anything.

1. Open Push and find the campaign. Sorting is by Sent at, so the most recent is at the top.
2. Select the results button on its row, or just click the row. Drafts have no results, so that button is disabled for them.
3. Read the four rates across the top first. Click-through rate is the honest headline for a message that went out: clicks as a share of what was actually sent.
4. Look at the delivery funnel underneath for where people dropped. Targeted is who the campaign was for, Sent is how many deliveries went out, Clicked is how many were opened, and Failed is set apart from the three because it is a share of everything attempted rather than a step.
5. Select any stage to see the profiles behind it, which is how you get from a number to the people it counts.
6. Narrow the whole page with the controls above the rates, by audience, by platform or by language, when you want to compare one group against another.
7. If an Errors tab appears beside the configuration tabs, open it. It is only there when the campaign actually produced errors, and it carries a count.

FAQs

Why is Estimated reach smaller than the cohort I picked?

Because the estimate counts only the profiles that can receive a push: those registered on one of the platforms this campaign selected. Everyone else in the cohort is in the audience but not reachable.

Why can I not edit who this campaign goes to?

Because it has started sending. Type, targeting and delivery are frozen from that point, and the notice at the top of Setup says so. Duplicate the campaign and edit the copy instead.

Why does the button say Send for approval instead of Launch?

Because this project runs push messages through an approval workflow. The campaign is saved as Pending approval, and somebody with the right to decide either approves or rejects it from the list.

The campaign says Sent but the click-through rate is zero. What now?

A Sent status means the sending finished, not that anyone read it. Open the funnel and compare Sent against Targeted first: a large gap there is a delivery problem, and the Errors tab will usually be present. If Sent is healthy and Clicked is not, the delivery worked and the message did not.

Can I send the same message again?

Duplicate it. The copy is saved as a new draft with (copy) after the name, so the original's results stay intact.

What is a silent push for?

Waking the app in the background without showing anything. It carries no title or body, so use it to prompt the app to do something rather than to tell somebody something.

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