Notifications behave in a different way than Popups and therefore the way we measure their performance requires some deeper dive. If you are new to Wisepops and want to first understand what the general metrics shown in the Analytics mean, we suggest that you start with this general introduction. In this article, we will walk you step by step how you can deep dive into the Analytics to understand the performance of Notifications.
1. How many visitors opened the feed?
Select "Notifications" in the top bar, then click on the Metrics box to make sure that you are displaying the "Reach" and "Sessions" metrics. In the example below, out of 1.8M sessions that landed on your website in total during the selected time period, 9.5% of the visitors opened the feed at least once. Note that this absolute number is not yet shown in the analytics.
This Reach metric is mainly impacted by the quality of your bell implementation on Mobile and on Desktop - please refer to this help article on advice to improve this.
On average, you should expect your Notifications reach to be in the 5% to 15% range. Note that these visitors who open the notification feed are higher value than average visitors and that on average they generate 25% to 45% of all your website revenue.
2. What do Notification displays measure?
When a visitor opens the feed and sees N notifications, it counts as N displays. For example, the feed below contains two notifications. If I open the feed, this will count as 2 displays. This is because displays are defined at the campaign level. The notification feed allows you to expose visitors to different campaigns at the same time.
Therefore when you look at the number of Notification displays in the analytics, an increase in their number can mean several things:
It can mean that more visitors came to your website and therefore, all other things being equal, more of them opened the feed and therefore the number of displayed notifications increase
Or, the reach of your notification feed increased for the same amount of traffic, and again more notifications were displayed
Or, the traffic was the same, and the feed open rate stayed constant, but maybe you published more notifications in the feed during that time
A notification counts as displayed even if it is below the fold of the feed and actually never scrolled.
Notification displays are only counted once per session. If the visitor re-opens the feed and sees the same notifications that they already previously viewed, it does not count as additional displays. But if there are new notifications in the feed that were not present during the previous feed opening, then these counts as new displays.
3. Notifications CTR
The notifications CTR is roughly defined as the number of notifications clicks divided by the number of notifications displays (see callout at this end of the section for a clarification about the approximation used in this definition).
Note that "click" here refers to the CTA click - if a visitor expands a notification but does not click on the CTA of the notification, it does not count as a click.
So if you have a single visitor on your website and there are 3 notifications in the feed, and this visitor clicks on one notification, it will count as 33% CTR for all Notifications.
A consequence of this CTR definition is that when you select all Notifications in the top bar, you should expect that the CTR is lower when you have a higher number of Notifications in the feed as they tend to compete against each other.
The definition above is only roughly correct because we only count 1 click max per visitor per session. So even if a visitor clicks on two notifications during the same session, we only count 1 click. Therefore, a more rigorous definition of the CTR in this case is that it counts the percentage of visitors who have converted with at least one notification.
Example walk-through
Let us apply these learnings with the example below, which uses the same data as in the first section.
As explained in the first section, 9.5% of your 1.8M visitors have opened the feed at least once. That amounts to 171,000 visitors who have opened the feed (9.5% of 1.8M).
In the screenshot below we can see that these visitors who opened the feed have seen 753,200 notifications ("Displays") in total. Therefore you can infer that on average each visitor who opened the feed has seen 4.4 different notifications displayed in the feed (753,200 / 171,000).
The screenshot below also shows that 55,900 visitors have clicked on at least one notification. This explains that across all your notifications, the average CTR was 7.4% (=55,900 visitors who clicked on a notification / 753,200 notification displays)
