Web Push Notification Advanced Tactics

01Welcome and webinar overview

Hello and welcome to another Aimtell webinar. My name is Zack, and I'm the host for this webinar. We're going to be covering advanced tactics today. I'm going to run through the bare minimum basics for a couple of minutes, just to get us going and make sure we're all on the same page, and then we're going to jump straight in.

I want to keep this about 20 to 25 minutes today. I like to keep them quite short and quite succinct, because I know there's a lot of content out there that can grab your attention, so we appreciate you tuning in. Looking forward to it. If you have any questions about anything, please feel free to ask away using the GoToWebinar panel in front of you. If we manage to get to them today, great. If not, I will follow up with some emails after.

So let's jump straight in. We've got a great beginner's guide. It's got a lot of stuff for beginners, but also a lot of stuff if you're intermediate, so it's very useful if you've not seen it. I'm just going to run through it quickly. What are web push notifications? They're notifications sent from websites, and they go to your desktop and to your mobile. The opt-in prompt is the start of the funnel for subscribers. It's a one-click opt-in, so very different to SMS and email.

Once you begin to collect those subscribers, you can start to engage them. Our installation is a JavaScript tracking code and a service worker file, so it's just two steps. Down on the bottom left, like I said, you have single-click opt-in, personalization, and lots and lots of automation, which we're going to be talking a lot about today. Once you begin to collect those subscribers, you begin to strategize and send them a notification.

The ones written down in front of you are the most basic. I like to think of them as just manual sends, and maybe some basic location segmentation, so you begin to bucket people based on where they live and just send blanket notifications. You can see here there are even a few different strategies and examples: drip notifications, personalized content and timing, all three of which we're going to be covering today. Abandoned cart, blog updates and referral requests are all great examples of things you can do. If you've not gotten started with Aimtell yet, reach out and we can activate your trial. Pretty straightforward stuff there. That's the basics.

02Building blocks and custom events

Now, advanced tactics with Aimtell. The most simple way to understand how it all works is based upon building blocks, and I like to think there are about three of them. A lot of our more advanced features are built upon these core ways of doing things. The first one is tracking custom events, the second is tracking custom attributes, and the third is tracking aliases.

Tracking custom events is done with a little piece of JavaScript that we're going to jump into. It's also worth saying that all of this happens after the opt-in prompt. When someone clicks allow, that's when all of our additional tags kick in. A lot of tools do a lot of different tracking, but with us the click on allow is very important. We'll definitely cover opt-in strategies towards the end of the webinar. So we click allow, and then all the other stuff comes in.

Now, the reason I'm going to be hammering custom events today is that everything else is built upon them. Tracking custom events is so powerful. There are three main uses for events. They're used for triggers, meaning triggered notifications. They're used for conversion tracking, so how to track conversions. And they're also used for segmentation, which is creating buckets for people.

So how do they work? Custom events are based upon five different categories. The first two are required: the category and the action. This could be page viewed, this could be video watched, notification clicked, whatever it may be. It's completely open-ended, and that's one of the real powerful features behind custom events and why they can be used for anything. The label, value and variables are all optional, and they give an extra layer of granularity. The variables, which are also extremely powerful, can provide dynamic personalization within actual pushes and also within segmentation.

An example for a variable, which I'm going to jump into in a second, is for abandoned cart. How powerful would it be if you could send a push 30 minutes after someone abandons a cart, with that exact coffee mug as the icon, the name of that coffee mug and the price of that coffee mug, all within a push, dynamically set? That's an extremely powerful feature, and that's all to do with our variables, labels and values.

If we hop over here to the logs, I want to give a quick shout-out to the logs. This is quite an unknown feature, as I deal with customers. Everything above logs is close to real time, about three hours, and that's because we make it look pretty and make sure it's filtered correctly. The logs hold a lot of the raw data, so if you want to see something in real time, you go to our logs. I love our logs. If we jump into custom events, we can begin to see some of the things. Let's jump to page four, there are some great ones over here. Here we go. These are just example ones on our test site, and you can see the visitors subscribing to push.

This is the one I wanted to see. The event category and event action is product viewed. Those are the two that are required, and everything else is optional and provides the extra layer of granularity. For instance, this example site has chosen to track the name of the product, which here is the name of a pair of sunglasses, and a value ascribed to it, fifteen or twenty-five. They also wanted to track some event variables on top of the category, action, label and value. You can see that we've linked the exact product page, and we've got the icon, which is a Shopify icon here. If we were to go to this link, we'd see the actual image of the product, and this is the icon. We'll cover how to use these variables in pushes momentarily, but you can see that this is all done simply from this little piece of JavaScript right here.

Here's an example for video watched. In this example they're not using the label and the value, but they are using the category, action and variables. The category and action are video watched, so that's enough, but they also wanted to pass the name of the video and even the URL of the video. Let's say, for instance, the push was a triggered push saying this person watched this video, and we want a dynamic push to be sent out two hours after they watched it. In that we want the name of the video they watched, and even a link to maybe a landing page following on from it. So there's a dynamic URL and a dynamic name, all tracked, and it's all done within this little tag.

It's simple code added to pages, or even button clicks, and as you can see here you can use a tag manager like Tealium or Google Tag Manager. It's right on there. For all of you techies out there, or not so techie such as myself, you can use it that way, or you can simply copy and paste it into a code editor for your site. So custom events are a very powerful feature. Triggers, segmentation and conversion are the three things I'm going to talk about in more depth in a second.

03Custom attributes and aliases

That's tracking custom events. Now what about tracking custom attributes? It's a similar sort of idea, but custom attributes are different to events. Their two main purposes are passing data into notifications and segmentation. For instance, if you're a lead gen site or an e-commerce site, a custom attribute could be a zip code, a credit score, a name, an email, a last name, a state or a country, whatever that may be. That's how you track custom attributes.

Not only can they be used dynamically to pass into notifications, you can also use them to create segments. You do it exactly the same way, with that little JavaScript tracking, and you can dynamically pull data in. I also want to give a shout-out at this point to our REST API. You can do both of these things through the API. I'm going to touch on the API and give a plug to another upcoming webinar if that interests you. I know enterprise-level clients always love the API because it's so, so powerful. Okay, let me take a sip of my coffee.

Right then, aliases. Aliases are another type of data that we can track, and they have to do with server-to-server integrations and the API. I won't give too much detail here, but let's say, for instance, you are running an ESP or SMS. You can use our aliases to begin tracking with other platforms and get that connected and up and running. I'm going to go into this a little more when we talk about the API momentarily.

04Click tracking and triggered notifications

Now you understand the basics of those three building blocks, so let's talk about some real advanced tactics, some practical things that we can do. The first one I want to talk about is notification drips. This is a very simple but very powerful concept, and it's used in other forms of marketing. To make a long story short, with Aimtell you can do drips based purely on time intervals, but you can also do them based upon user engagement and interaction.

The most simple and basic way to begin setting this up is to go to websites, then edit, then jump into misc settings and turn on track notification clicks and track subscriptions as events. These two things are the real beauty of this page. I love them, but there are a lot of beautiful things on here, so if you've not seen them, have a quick read. Why would we want to track notification clicks and subscriptions as events? Well, as we just said, custom events are for triggers, segmentation and conversions. Once they're events, you can begin to use them for those things. If you wanted to create a welcome notification or a welcome drip, you're going to need the subscription as a custom event. When we check the logs, the result says subscribe to push. That's how you do it.

The same goes for notification clicks as events. If we jump down here and look back in the logs, now that this has been active for a while, we can see visitors subscribe to push. This means that if we set up a triggered notification with subscribe to push as the category and action, we can send a notification to someone who has just subscribed to push. Another example here is notification clicked. Here we've got the label and the value. The label is RSS, or manual, or even one-off, which is more for internal stuff, or triggered, which is actually called event. You can see manual, and then the value, which here is a number, is the manual campaign ID. So what this custom event is actually saying is that when someone clicks on this campaign, a custom event is made for later use.

Let's hop into triggered notifications and remember this: notification clicked, RSS, 2289. I'll quickly introduce a test one here in the background. This is how you build that notification, fairly straightforward. The trigger we want is going to be notification clicked, which is very important, and it's exactly the same: RSS, 2289. What does this actually mean? If someone clicks on this notification, a custom event will be made. That custom event will then go through logic checks to see if it's a trigger, which for this notification it is. Once we see that event happen, the trigger will be pulled and this notification will be sent, and if you're tracking conversions, we'll listen for those conversions. You can set a time delay on all of these settings.

Why is this powerful? Well, think of it this way. Let's say your RSS is a content feed, so you're sending content via RSS notifications. Great, but it's not really a call to action, it's not really sales, and it's not something you can make money off. But you only want to be engaging people who are active on your site. A great way to do that is by testing whether they're active, by seeing their custom event. You're sending this notification, and the follow-up could be far more specific. It could be an article about iPhones, for example, and the follow-up says: hey, interested in iPhone cases? Here's a direct link to our store. Or we saw you clicked on a link about car parts, car wheels, I don't know, and here's a notification about buying car wheels or tires, whatever it may be. That is how you do it, and it's all automatic, especially when using RSS notifications.

Next, welcome drips. This would be a notification click drip, and we've actually got two great templates in here that you can use. It's a similar sort of concept, but instead of triggering on interaction, you set it up via time interval. Just so you know, welcome notifications or welcome drips are by far the highest-performing type of notification in aggregate. If you've not got a welcome drip set up, please go and do it. You can see here this is the notification, and this is the trigger, visitor subscribed to push. The time delay is how we do the drip here, because one is zero minutes and the other one is a day.

Another quick tidbit here, which is a great tactic, is emojis. Notifications with emojis are 85% more likely to be clicked. If you're not using emojis, using them is very, very powerful.

05Conversion tracking and webhooks

Now, conversion tracking. There are a few different ways to do this. Obviously there's our in-house conversion tracking, which is the most accurate and the most powerful, and that again is based upon custom events. For e-commerce sites that could be item purchased. For publishers or advertisers who are affiliates, it could be a link being clicked or a button being clicked that links out to where they get paid, on a CPA or CPC basis, or a form. In real estate it could be a particular house being viewed, where they get paid when this house is viewed. For gaming, or something like betting, it could be when a product or a particular game is played. You can track that as a custom event. Once that comes in as an event, the same as a trigger, you come in here and define whatever it is as the conversion.

A lot of times people want to use notification clicked as the conversion. However, notification clicks are tracked automatically, so you don't need to specify this as a conversion. That would be a false positive. Obviously if we did visitor clicked or whatever, you can see here the category and action never occur together, which means that it won't track correctly. So that's conversions.

We also have full integration with third parties for tracking, especially webhooks, which are the main way we do that. You can go to websites and then webhooks. These are the three things that we pass natively by default: new subscriber, push notification click and push notification impression. You're obviously going to need a third-party URL to begin tracking those postbacks, and these are all the parameters that get passed over. You know about this stuff, we've got it. You've also got great integrations with Google Analytics. You simply click this box to include UTM parameters, and it will automatically include those parameters for you. So that's a very powerful feature.

Now, aliases. Aliases, like I said, are used for things like emails and usernames, and they're primarily used to connect your API with another API, so API or server-to-server. We've got a webinar coming up on July 30th that is going to be more focused on the API and how to amplify your usage. That is actually going to be hosted by my founder and CEO, or the family, I should say, DJ. He invented it, so he knows how it all works and he's great at explaining that stuff, so he's going to be running that one on July 30th. Stay tuned for more info on aliases and other ways to do third-party integration.

06Personalization and abandoned carts

Personalization is another advanced topic here. If we jump into all subscribers and view my subscriber here, you can see the aliases and custom attributes. I went in and added this default custom attribute, but you can track them as is using this tag here. If we then use variables in a notification, we'll pull that up in the background, and we can see here a great example: hey John Smith, you've got five new items. All of a sudden you can see the power when you see a notification with your first name in it, or the state you live in, or the city you live in, all things we can track. With custom events tracking, you can begin to see the power of using it.

How do you do this? I've just made a very basic one here. When we click on this little bell at the top right, we can begin to build out a notification. You can select the attribute here and then the fallback text. We'll do it like this, and let me type this correctly: hey there. If the first name hasn't been tracked, the fallback text will show, as you can see here. If it has been tracked, it will show as is, or whatever is being tracked there. It's a very, very powerful feature. Why is personalization so powerful? It increases your CTR right out of the gate.

You can also use the variables that I mentioned earlier. The abandoned cart ones I specifically mentioned earlier are extremely powerful. If you use Shopify, we track them automatically and you can just begin to use them straight out of the box. I've already shown you how to track them and how they look, but they are so powerful at taking those notifications to the next level and beginning to see the performance.

Running quickly through, the next one is abandoned funnel notifications. These are similar to abandoned cart but more general. This could be for publishers or for lead gen, for people who have a live affiliate funnel where they get paid at the end of that funnel. When someone abandons at the second step, you want to send them a notification to really target, recapture and regain that potential lead and potential payout. This is how you do abandoned funnel, and it's very straightforward. We've got two very simple JavaScript tags that you can place. You create that triggered notification and begin sending, and it's as easy as that. If a user abandons a funnel, you send a push to get them back. This is how you do it.

07Cross-domain tracking

The last one I want to talk about is cross-domain tracking. We've covered quite a lot today, and this is going to be the last one, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask away and I will cover them. The question we get quite often is: hey, I've got a site at yoursite.com, but my blog is at blog.yoursite.com, what do I do? Maybe a lot of your path happens on your blog, or even a store on another domain. Cross-domain tracking pixels are simply a way to begin tracking events on a site that doesn't have Aimtell installed.

All it is is that you add a pixel. Let's say we want this pixel to be page viewed. You create the pixel here, fill out the blanks, and it automatically generates a script for you. Copy and paste it, add it as a tag, or do whatever you want with it. Put it on the page where you want to track the custom event, and maybe you want to add a label, a value, whatever it is, say a value of 50 bucks. All of a sudden that is how you do it, and it's super, super powerful. Remember that push subscriptions are domain-specific, so custom event tracking is a workaround, and as you can see we built one in less than a minute. Very, very powerful.

I see a question coming in here, so I want to give a quick recap and then we'll answer that question. What did we cover? Advanced tactics. First, notification drips: welcome drips, a notification click drip, maybe an RSS feed into a triggered notification, all automatic. You don't have to do anything, just set it up and get it going. Second, personalization within notifications: use those custom attributes and those variables that come in. Third, conversion tracking: use the custom events as your conversion tracking and begin to get accurate data flowing in for your campaigns. Fourth, the API and aliases. DJ is going to be covering that on July 30th, but there's no harm in beginning to track those emails right now for later on. Fifth, abandoned funnel notifications, again a powerful way to begin re-engaging those people. And last, cross-domain tracking: begin tracking those events that happen on other domains and capturing them back here.

08Opt-in prompt questions

The question I've got here is about the opt-in prompt. Can we customize the opt-in prompt? Yes, you can. The opt-in properties are over here, and there's full customization of how you want to show it, including a custom opt-in prompt. We can add conditions in here, so there are a lot of different things you can do. You can even use wildcards with asterisks and things like that. You can change the priority, the type of prompt, and the devices that it applies to. You can also jump into the CSS for the actual opt-in prompts, so this has a lot of different capabilities that you can optimize. I recommend you have a little look at our CSS documentation.

You can also manually trigger the opt-in prompts based upon user interaction on your site, which is a very powerful feature. Someone clicks on a button and then you want the opt-in, or someone clicks on an image. If you have more questions on that, please feel free to reach out and we can help you out, but yes, you can fully customize your opt-in prompt. That is definitely another advanced tactic that we didn't have time to cover today. We've got the sending down, but you want to optimize your opt-in strategy: begin to customize it, begin to create something that's personal and brand-sensitive and works for you. You'll definitely begin to see more opt-ins.

Thank you for watching. I know we went a little bit over, to about 30 minutes, so thank you so much for sticking with me this entire time. Just to say again, my name is Zack. If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly. I'll type my email in here: zack at aimtell.com. I'm here as a support person, and remember that our success team will be able to help you out too. It's been a pleasure being your host today, and we look forward to seeing you on another webinar.