Audience Engagement Digital Innovation
2 mins read

Publisher apps: What you need to know about push notifications

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Pushwoosh, the push notification specialist, has released its findings into how media companies are using its push notification platform and, importantly, what works in terms of benchmarks and app performance.

The research covered anonymized per-platform statistics of 104 active news publishers from 10 countries including U.S., Germany, Russia, India, Austria, and others.

The report highlights push notifications performance on the two main mobile platforms: iOS and Android, and for different sizes of media apps: from <10K subscribers to >1M subscribers.

Here are the key ‘at a glance’ findings:

  • The average news app sends three push notifications a day, with a click-through-rate (CTR) of 4.5% on iOS and 5% on Android.
  • The fewer notifications a media app sends per day, the higher CTR each push receives. Pushwoosh cites a Spanish media app sending 1–2 pushes per day that achieves a 19% CTR (4x the average) and an Indian business publisher that sends less than one push per day and achieves a 35% CTR (6x the average).
  • However, for specialized news apps with highly engaged audiences, publishers can send more push notifications and still achieve respectable CTR figures. One regional news outlet in Germany, as an example, sends eight pushes a day and achieves 8% CTR (4x the average).
  • The best performing media app in the entire study sent three push notifications per day.
  • Android metrics score higher than iOS because the Android system UX puts all the pushes in the notification drawer – a user will view them every time they pull down the control center. With iOS, pushes stay visible on the lock screen but disappear after unlocking the device.
  • A high opt-in rate doesn’t guarantee a high CTR – there is no strong correlation.
  • To boost engagement, Pushwoosh recommends news publishers segment app users based on their attributes and real-time behavior, and tag their push notifications accordingly – readers also should be allowed to subscribe to the topics of their choice. They also recommend frequency capping of push notifications.

For further reading, the entire report can be downloaded here.