Setting up Push Notifications

Step 1: Navigate to Push Notification Dashboard

As you log into your dashboard, you’ll see the screen below. Click on the Push icon to navigate to Taplytics’ Push platform.

Here, you’ll see the Push dashboard where you can see a list of pushes that have been created.

Step 2: Click on “Create New Push” button in the top right corner

To start setting up a push notification, click on the Create New Push button in the top right corner of the dashboard as displayed in the screenshot below:

 

You’ll see a drop-down menu, select the Notification option to proceed. This part of the Taplytics Push Notification platform can be used for one-off marketing messages or experiments. Upon clicking this, you’ll be redirected to the Push Notification publisher.

Step 3: Choose your environment

By default, your environment is set to Development. This means that if you were to leave it on Development, any pushes you send would be sent out to Development devices only. This would be to test and ensure that your push notification is going out as intended.

If you’re ready to send to Production users, meaning real live users who’ve downloaded your app from the app store, you’d simply choose Production instead.

Step 4: Choose your user segment

By default, the segment editor is set to All Users, so if you want to target everyone (for iOS and Android) you would leave the user segment as is.

At the top of the Push Notification publisher, you will be prompted to select a User Segment. Here, you’ll be targeting the group of users who will be receiving a Push Notification.

In order to choose your user segment, you would click on the drop-down menu as pointed out above.

Let’s say you wanted to send a push to iOS users whose purchase values were a certain dollar amount like $95 for instance. In order to accomplish this, you would select the option Platform, set the operator to is, and select iOS from the value drop-down, as seen in the screenshot shown on the next page.

You would then click the AND modifier, scroll down to Custom User Data, choose Total Purchase Value (as it’s a user attribute you’ve set and are not sending to Taplytics), set the operator to greater than or equal to, and set the value to 95.

From here, you can drill down further and add more filters if you wanted to get even more granular in terms of who you want the experiment to be distributed to.

Step 5: Craft your push notification message and campaign name

Here, you’ll be entering the message you want to send to your users, as you can see in the screenshot below. It’s as simple as using any text editor, and you can see a quick preview of your message displayed on either an iOS or Android device on the right-hand side of the screen.

 

Step 6: Send out a test push notification to development devices

To send out push notifications to internal development devices, you would leave the drop-down menu at its default value, Development, as noted above. By doing this you can confirm that you see the push being sent on your device (assuming you have push notifications enabled!) before you set the environment from Development to Production (meaning it will go out to real live users).

Once all of the fields have been set and you wanted to send the message immediately, you would press the Send Now button and then you’ll get the success prompt letting you know that your push notification has been sent.

If you need to test again just to make sure, send out another test push, where you would recreate the exact same push again.

From there, once you send press Send Now, you’ll get a success prompt and then see your scheduled push in the dashboard. You can edit the push notification’s contents but you can’t reschedule it.

 

Step 7: Send out a push notification to live (production) users

Once you’ve confirmed that the push is working, you would have to recreate that same push with a different campaign name such as Your campaign (Live) and the same message.

To send it to live production users, you would set the environment to Production as shown below.

Just like sending out a test push, once all of the fields have been set and you wanted to send the message immediately, you would press the Send Now button and then you’ll get the success prompt letting you know that your push notification has been sent.

 

Step 8: Scheduling your push notification

In some instances, you’ll want to send out a push notification right away. As you can see in the screenshot above, you can do that by hitting the Send Now button. After pressing the Send Now button, you should have a success prompt as seen below.

However, in the majority of your cases, you’ll most likely be scheduling your pushes for some time in the future.

In this case, you would select the Send it Later option and there you’ll see a calendar drop down with the option to select a date and time for delivery.

Here you can change the timing of when you want to send your push notification to any date or time in the future by pressing the Queue to Send Later button. You’ll then see the success prompt that your message is on its way!

 

Step 9: If you need to cancel your push notification

If for one reason or another, you need to stop the push, you can press the stop button as indicated above. This will only work for notifications scheduled at some point in the future.

You’ll be presented a pop-up warning (shown above) that allows you to dismiss the warning because you changed your mind or proceed with stopping it all together. You’ll then hit the stop button and your push notification will be cancelled.

If you choose to send a push instantly it will start sending as soon as you select "Send Now”, so you won’t be able to “unsend” any pushes that have been already sent.