
Ask HN: How does your app manage push notifications? - probe
How do you keep track of things like -<p>a) Push notification fatigue 
b) Lifecycle of push notification
c) Push notification open rates
d) etc.<p>Curious if any tools&#x2F;processes that have been tried, what worked&#x2F;didn&#x27;t work.
======
gdeglin
I'm one of the founders of OneSignal. Here's some of what we've seen our
clients do for each of these:

a) Push notification fatigue

You should treat notifications as you do any other major product feature. This
means seeking to experience the feature yourself as a user would, doing user
research & interviews, and instrumenting analytics around this.

In general, you should make sure that notifications are very useful to your
recipient as often as possible. For notifications that make a vibration/sound,
aim for 50%+ of notifications to be very useful. For notifications that do not
play a vibration or sound, 20% is a reasonable target.

b) Lifecycle of push notification

Tools like OneSignal help with this. We recommend setting up a well-thought-
out series of automated messages, or scheduled messages, based on user
interactions.

c) Push notification open rates

OneSignal and other tools provide this data. Keep in mind that open rates are
just part of the picture -- users often open the app directly after receiving
a notification. In OneSignal this is tracked as an "Influenced Open".
Furthermore, make sure you're tracking CTR against notifications actually
received by the device, not just notifications you send (Some notifications
may have been "sent" to devices that are no longer active and won't receive
it).

Whether you use OneSignal or build notification support yourself, this is an
important metric to instrument correctly and keep an eye on.

~~~
Nextgrid
Why do you recommend 50% as a lower bound for “useful” notifications? Why
would you send a notification that’s not useful in the first place?

~~~
gdeglin
It can sometimes be impossible to be 100% sure that notification is useful.

For example, you might follow 100 people on Instagram, but only really care
about updates from 20 of them. Instagram uses several signals to detect which
people you want to hear updates from (such as whose images you favorite the
most). It's impossible for them to always be 100% certain, but they do the
best they can. I'd wager that about 50%+ of the Instagram notifications I get
are those I feel are worth clicking on, and I'm glad they send them to be.

------
notlukesky
I have turned off most push notifications as they have become spam in most
cases.

There are solutions like clevertap that might solve some of those issues. I
think having granular level approvals would help. I turned off most news apps
notifications because they were spamming with tennis results and royal
weddings etc... when in fact I would appreciate more relevant content to me
that they could easily have seen from my consumption patterns within the apps
like breaking tech news etc...

