![How to Measure the Effectiveness of Push Notifications [Success Metrics & KPIs]](/blog/content/images/size/w2000/2021/03/image--7-.png)
There are 7 useful metrics you can measure to prove effectiveness of your push notification campaigns:
Pushwoosh can help you figure out and improve all of these metrics.
Below, we’ll explain which ones are the most illustrative for your business case and industry. We’ll also give you formulas to calculate the rates.
How to choose the right success metric and KPI to evaluate your push notifications efficiency
Track the most relevant metric for your industry
For example, media typically pay specific attention to CTR.
Higher CTR → more traffic to the platform → more appeal for advertisers.
E-commerce apps normally focus on conversion rates and revenue increase as their KPIs.
Subscription-based apps prioritize ARPU and retention.
Without any doubt, all types of apps track their opt-outs and uninstalls.
Focus on your campaign objective
What is the ultimate action you’re motivating your audience to take?
If your goal is to simply inform users of something, CTR may be the best performance metric to look at.
If you aim at motivating users to conduct a specific action in your app, you should prioritize CR and other KPIs that have a direct impact on your ROI.
Calculate your push notifications CTR
CTR is the first metric to measure when evaluating effectiveness of your push notifications. The higher your click-through rate is, the more conversions you can gain further.
Here is how we calculate CTR in Pushwoosh Control Panel:
Other push notification providers may use a different formula for calculating CTR, so be cautious of this when comparing data from several communication platforms.
When you’re optimizing your communications, CTR is the first metric you may want to improve.
Although important, CTR is only an interim metric. You can easily make it skyrocket with clickbait headlines, but they won’t bring any profit to your business.
In most cases, you aim at more valuable metrics, so you want to...
Measure conversion rates
How many users have actually triggered an action you motivated them to perform with a push notification?
- Read an article
- Watched a video or a live stream
- Tried a new feature
- Added a product to the cart
- Made a purchase
There may be different formulas for calculating conversion rates, but in the Pushwoosh dashboard, you will get your CR measure this way:
If you use Pushwoosh, you don’t need to keep a CR formula in mind. There is the Conversion Tracking feature that measures your push notification CR for you. This is particularly useful for e-commerce and product apps with multiple subscription models.
Determine revenue
If your goal is:
- monetization,
- gross merchandise volume (GMV),
- or revenue growth,
you must be interested in tracking how much revenue your push campaigns generate.
In Pushwoosh, revenue is calculated automatically too, using the Conversion Tracking feature. All you need to do is set up Purchase Events.
Calculate ARPU
The average revenue per user is an important metric to measure when evaluating the ROI of your push notification marketing campaigns.
Low ARPU may indicate a need to stimulate more in-app purchases, subscription upgrades, or upsells (depending on your revenue model).
Low ARPU may also inspire you to make some tweaks to your business model.
This is how we calculate ARPU in Pushwoosh:
Measure retention
Another important success rate for push notifications is retention. The reality is that within the first week of install, apps typically lose from 80 to 90% of users.
But once a new user of your mobile app hits the 7-day mark, their risk of churn drops considerably. This means it’s worth investing in user retention with push notifications.
If done right, push notifications may boost your retention by up to 40%. At least, these are the average results we get with our clients.
There are a lot of formulas that help you calculate the performance metric. In Pushwoosh, we use this one:
Calculate opt-outs
The two metrics you never want to grow are opt-outs and uninstalls. They show how many users were dissatisfied with your push notifications and either opted out from receiving your communications or uninstalled your app completely.
Here is the formula for measuring your opt-out rate we recommend:
If you don’t like the resulting number, consider getting your subscribers back with in-app messages.
Estimate the uninstall rate
In 2020, app uninstall rates increased by 70% across the industries, and e-commerce apps were the hardest hit, losing up to $120K monthly.
Luckily, many apps can avoid such enormous losses by launching re-engagement campaigns.
Do your current communications counteract uninstalls effectively? Find your answer using the formula:
These are the essential performance metrics you should track to measure the effectiveness of your push notifications. Track the metrics and build a strategy to grow them with Pushwoosh. Start working on it now for free:
Or talk to our team to discover the most efficient tools for your business case:
