If you’re familiar with email marketing, then learning about web push notifications won’t be too much of a challenge. The two channels have a lot in common including the KPIs used to track their success. If you’re familiar with what web push notifications are and what they look like, then you know that just like an email, users need to opt-in to receive a message. Also just like email, once the message is delivered, a user will see a title (or subject line) and a short message (preview text). These similarities result in the following common metrics between email and web notifications.
Subscribe Rates
Your subscribe rate is the number of people who subscribed to receive web push notifications in proportion to the number of people who visited your site. In order to get visitors to subscribe, you have to serve them with an opt-in request.
The level of effort involved in opting in is lower than with email because rather than typing in their email address, users only need to click allow. Other than the level of effort and what they’re signing up for, subscribe rates are similar across email and web notifications. Over time, you can track your subscribe rates and run tests to determine the best place and time to ask visitors to opt in.
Click Through Rates
When you send an email you have to worry about delivery, open, and click through rates whereas with web notifications, you need only worry about click through rates (CTRs). Your CTR is the number of subscribers who clicked through to the URL presented in the notification in proportion to the number of subscribers who received the notification. Generally, web push notifications have fewer actions available for subscribers than emails, which results in higher average CTRs (4-6% vs. 3-4%).
If you familiar with the structure of a web push notification, then you know there’s not a lot you can optimize, which actually makes testing for better CTRs easier. Higher CTRs are the key to getting your content, offers, and announcements seen. Run A/B tests to optimize your titles and messages and determine what motivates your subscribers to click through.
Time on Page
Time on page is a standard metric used across many channels including email, SEO, social media, and of course, web push notifications. A higher time on page isn’t always the desired outcome though—it’s up to you to determine what your ideal time on page is for each landing page you create. So how can time on page help you optimize your web push notifications?
Compare your ideal time on page to your actual time on page to track success. You can also compare time on page for users who came in through a push notification vs. other channels like social media, email, and search. This will help you develop a better understanding of how your notifications are performing against channels you’re more familiar with. If your time on page isn’t what you were expecting and/or doesn’t match what you’re seeing on other channels, then there’s room to optimize your notifications (and your landing page). First, try testing different messaging. There’s a chance that your message didn’t give subscribers accurate expectations about the page they were clicking through to. If messaging doesn’t seem to be the issue, then it may be the type of content you pushed out. Keep track of how certain types of content (e.g. deals vs. blog content) perform over time to develop a better understanding of what subscribers want to and expect to see in their desktop notifications.
Conversion Rates
Depending on your business, a conversion could be a number of things—a sale, a lead, a download, etc. No matter the conversion type, however, we can all agree that more conversions are better! Not every email or push notification you send will have a conversion goal. For example, you may just want users to visit your site and read through your new blog post. For the notifications that are intended to lead to conversions—sale notifications, new premium feature announcements, add to cart notifications—your conversion rate is one, if not the, most important metric to track.
Over time you can determine which notifications and landing pages work best for higher conversion rates. You may learn that certain messages are best sent via email and others work better as web push notifications. The best way to figure out how web push notifications fit into your marketing strategy is to start using them and test, test, test.