How to Create Push Experiments

Sometimes, we may not get the right push notification messaging right the first time. That’s why it’s important to experiment with different content, timing and personalization strategies to understand what resonates with your users to drive engagement and retention.

This is where Push Experiments come in - A/B testing your pushes allows you to experiment with variations and segmentation of your pushes to determine which versions have the greatest impact.

What to test in a push experiment?

• Content: Text, use of emojis, images - what combination and positioning works best?
• Timing: Is there a specific time of day when users are more engaged?
• Audience: Will different user segments be more engaged with different content?

Create your push experiment

1. Create a Push Experiment

Under the Push menu in your Dashboard, click on Create New Push > Create Push Experiment and give the push experiment a name.

2. Configure your Notification content

Upon creating a new push, you'll be able to fill in the details for the first Variation of your push. Add the correct content and schedule the first Variation for delivery.

You can insert up to 255 characters in each push notification including emojis by simply pasting or typing them directly into the notification message text box. You may also insert an image to send along with the push if you've setup Rich Push Notifications.

3. Create your Variations

Once you've finished creating your first Variation, click on Add Variation to start creating different variations for your push experiment. Use the radio button to move between Variations and the slider to adjust the distribution of each Variation. Make sure that you modify each piece of the Notification as it resets on a new Variation. It also helps to give each Variation a descriptive name.

4. Selecting you Audience

After creating your Push Notification content, the next step is to select your Audience and determined which users you'd like to send the notifications to. Users eligible for the Push will be distributed randomly by the Variation Distribution percentage into each Variation.

You can find our more about our Audience Segmentation filters here.

For "Push Environment", you can choose to send the push to Development or Production devices; if you are QA'ing your app and would like to push only to phones with a development build, choose Development. If you are ready to roll your push experiment out to Production users (which you can narrow down in the next section), choose Production. The type of the build is defined by how the App is signed.

5. Start your Push Experiment

After completing the steps above, double-check that you've selected the correct audience and added the correct content and start your push experiment by hitting the Start Experiment button.