Overview
Hi there! Welcome to Localytics. We’re excited to have you on board with us—and we can’t wait to help you achieve all of your mobile marketing goals.
This quick start guide is intended to help you get to value with Localytics as quickly as possible. We’ll cover:
- sending your first push message,
- the importance of segmentation,
- setting mobile KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your app,
- and building a custom dashboard.
If you’re looking for more information on analytics, developer implementation, or other messaging tools—head over to our User Guide and Developer Docs.
Ready? Let’s dive straight in!
Setting Mobile Goals
You’re invested in mobile—that much is certain. But maybe you’re not quite sure what kind of metrics you want to (or even can) move. That’s where we come in!
Most of the time, you’ll work with your Mobile Engagement Consultant (MEC) to set mobile goals that align with your business goals. MECs are available to help your business grow with mobile. Whether that’s through increasing your Daily Active Users (DAU), getting more users to purchase your products, or increasing mobile engagement—we’re here to help however you need us.
If you’d rather get started on your own, we recommend thinking about how mobile is currently functioning in your business goals. Here are some questions you should think about:
- When you set out to join the mobile space, what did you want your app to do?
- What is the goal of your app now (if things have changed)?
- Who are your power users?
- What are your marketing goals?
- Can you translate those marketing goals to mobile?
By thinking through these questions, you should be able to carve out some success metrics for your app. Here’s a quick example:
- Question: What is the primary goal of your app?
- Example answer: To sell clothes.
- Mobile goal: Increase the number of users who checkout through the mobile app.
- Tools to get there: push message users with items still in their carts; in-app discounts for flash sales; omnichannel messaging to target users based on their viewing history
You can measure the success of your app in a lot of different ways. Think about how your messaging strategy (and later, your segmentation strategy) roll up into your higher-level marketing goals. This will help you be even more effective with Localytics.
Welcome Screen
When you first log into your Localytics dashboard, you’ll land on the Welcome Screen. The Welcome Screen shows your app performance at a glance.
We’ll always show you the same top-level metrics: Daily Active Users, New Users, Churned Users, and Reactivated users. If you’re curious about how we define any of these metrics, hover over the small question mark next to each for a short description.
Below the top-level metrics, we’ll highlight relevant data for your more recent campaigns. These metrics are dynamically populated, so they will be different depending on the goal you set for the campaign (more on that in a little bit). Check out your dashboard to see exactly what kind of metrics we’re serving to you.
Navigation
You may be working with multiple apps—like an iOS app vs. an Android app, or maybe you work with a company that has multiple apps. From everywhere within your dashboard, you can change which app you’re working with by selecting the name of the app from the drop-down menu in the header. Settings are different between iOS and Android, so make sure you’ve chosen the correct app on your side.
On the sidebar of your dashboard, you’ll see the navigation. At the bottom of the menu, you’ll see your name and your organization’s name. Clicking the three small dots will open the Settings menu. Here you’ll find things like your API keys, your profile and permissions, custom dashboards, and general account settings.
Outside of Settings, we’ve split the dashboard navigation into two top-level categories: marketing and analytics.
Within Marketing we house:
- Attribution
- Audiences
- Messaging
- Workflows (currently in beta)
- Places
- Profiles
- Remarketing
In Analytics you’ll find:
We won’t walk through all of these in our quick start guide (just Push Messaging), so if you’d like to learn more about any of these, check out our corresponding user guides (linked above).
Before we get started building our first message, let’s talk about what a push message is.
What is a Push Message/Notification?
A push notification is a message sent to an end user outside of your app. It is usually delivered to the home screen, or as a temporary banner at the top of the screen.
Because they can reach users at any time, push notifications are primarily used for two purposes. The first is to notify users of important or time-sensitive information (like breaking news or travel information). The second is to re-engage users by driving them into your app.
Push notifications are a great way to provide value from your app when the user isn’t directly interacting. Since push messages can sometimes be seen as intrusive, make sure you’re providing value with every bit of copy you send. We’ll talk more about some best practices in the next few sections.
Sending Your First Message
Localytics gives you the ability to send push, in-app, inbox (messages to a dedicated inbox within your app), and geopush (what we called Places) messages. Today we’re only going to walk through sending your first Push notification. However, the process is similar for all types of messages, so you should be able to apply your knowledge across the board.
We’ll also talk a little bit about best practices for building the best message, some examples of good use cases, and some tips for measuring success.
If you’d prefer to test this process outside of your live Localytics instance, feel free to check out our demo.
Building a Push Message
From your dashboard, select Messaging from the sidebar (under the Marketing heading). You can click the Create new button available on hover, or choose the large green button with the + symbol inside.
Select the type of campaign you’d like to create—in this case, we’re creating a Push campaign.
Name your campaign. Make sure you pick something descriptive so you can easily find it for data analysis in the future.
Set a Message Goal
After you’ve named your campaign, you’ll want to select the goal. Different goals will surface different metrics within the analytics dashboard for the campaign. Make sure you pick a goal that aligns closest to your company goals for the campaign. Here’s a full list of how each of the goals play out.
Once you’ve selected a goal, you can choose how the goal is measured. We measure goal success by events (ie, product viewed, checkout completed), so make sure your events are tagged in your app. If you don’t have any events tagged yet, just choose to Disable conversion tracking for this campaign.
Select a Message Audience
After you’ve chosen a goal, you’ll be given an option to select an audience. Here you’ll have three choices—send to Everyone, send to a previously Saved Audience, or build a New Audience to send the message to.
We won’t walk through setting up an audience in this tutorial but check out this short video for a quick overview. You can also see the Audience User Guide for the full explanation.
If this is your first message (and you want to start with something simple), we recommend sending out a message to all of your users. We call this type of communication a broadcast message. If this is the case, choose Everyone at the Audience screen before you Continue to Creatives.
We’ll talk a little more about segmentation later in this guide, but we recommend starting your messaging efforts by casting a wide net. This way you’ll get some solid baseline metrics, and start to see the future benefit of targeted messaging campaigns.
Build the Message
Now it’s time to build your actual push message!
Choosing an optional name allows you to access the push by this name in the future. This allows you to differentiate between creatives (if you’re A/B testing). You’ll also be able to use the name as an Event Attribute when creating an Audience in the future. Use the optional name to label the push without compromising the copy.
When it comes to building the message copy, you can do a lot of different things. Short and sweet is always best, but you can supplement your copy with images (or videos and gifs on iOS) and emojis. Figure out your goal—whether that’s awareness, sales, interactions—and get your copy there as quickly as possible.
We’ve found companies that use 10 or fewer words in their push copy get better click-through rates.
It’s also important to think about timing. We’ll talk about scheduling in the next section, but think about what your end user is when they receive your message. Are they on their lunch break? Having their first cup of coffee? Sleeping?
Context—in every sense of the word—is key when it comes to messaging. Push notifications can often be seen as intrusions—so aim to make your copy (and your timing) as unobtrusive as you can. Give your end users something of value when you message them. That can be as small as a slight chuckle, or as big as a free item at checkout.
If you’re not yet sure about what kind of copy your end users respond to best, you can always go some A/B testing. Compare copy with the Add Creative tool (or Clone the original creative) on the sidebar.
Send two different pieces of copy—and see which one performs better.
After you’ve crafted your message—and added any rich push elements (gifs, images, or videos)—it’s time to schedule the message.
Schedule the Message
The timing of your message is key—you wouldn’t want to inform users of a flash shoe sale at 3 in the morning.
It’s important to schedule your message. When you get to the scheduling phase, you’ll see a few choices:
- One time: send the message once, immediately
- One time: Send the message once, at a scheduled time
- Automated: by timing, frequency, and a start/stop date
Messages sent Immediately will be sent to all users in your chosen Audience immediately—regardless of timezone. Make sure you’re deliberate and thoughtful with this option. Over-messaging your end users (especially at times they’re not using their devices) could drive them to turn off notifications. Immediately is a great option for breaking news, but not so much for a midnight workout.
You can also schedule your message to send at a certain time. Schedule to send the message at the same time for all users or staggered based on their local timezone. Choose the same time for all users if your Audience is in a single timezone; otherwise, you should schedule the message based on timezone.
We’ve seen the highest level of engagement and conversion (ie, click-through) around the middle of the day—anywhere between 11 AM and 3 PM. The next best time is right before bedtime for most folks—between 9 PM and midnight.
Finally, you can automate your message. You can schedule the message to send:
- Hourly
- Daily
- Every other day
- Weekly
- Monthly
Again, you can deliver the message in the user’s local timezone, or send it out at the same time for everyone.
You also have the option to cap the frequency with which the message is sent. To avoid overwhelming your users, you can limit the message to:
- Send only once per device
- Cap at a certain number (within a single, repeated message)
- Send multiple times, but limit the frequency (ie, only 1 every 3 days)
If you’d like to review some best practices for scheduling messages, check out our eBook: An Even Better Recipe for Perfect Push Notifications.
Send the Message
Once you’ve chosen a goal, picked your Audience, built the message, and scheduled it—it’s finally time to send it out to the world!
Head to the Confirm screen. Double (triple, quadruple) check your message. Make sure you’ve set your goals properly, chosen the right audience, spelled everything correctly in your message, and scheduled it exactly how you’d like.
We also highly recommend testing your push message on your own device (and a friend’s!) before you hit Activate.
When you’re confident the message is ready for its debut, click that bright green Activate button and throw yourself a little party at your desk. You sent your first message with Localytics! Hurrah!
Getting Started with Segmentation
The best messages are also the most personal. With Localytics you can send highly targeted messages to your end users. We help you do this through automatic and manual tagging, profile attributes, and events.
If you’ve already got information about your app users (like name, preferences, location), you can upload this data to Localytics. With your data CSV, head to the Profiles section of your Localytics dashboard, choose the Actions option and select Upload CSV. Alternatively, you could import this data with the Import API.
Segmentation and personalization are unique to each company. As you continue to explore your use case and figure out what kind of behavior you’re hoping to drive, you can begin to tag different events.
Say you want to target users who visit the subscription page of your app, but don’t sign up. You can tag this interaction as an event, and later message those users to nudge them toward a subscription.
You can also use Liquid (sometimes called personalized or dynamic content) to serve a ton of custom information to your users.
When it comes to segmentation and personalization, you’ll want to approach it one step at a time. It’s pretty overwhelming to figure out exactly how you’d like your users to use your app. Let your tags bubble up organically as users make unexpected decisions.
Maybe you notice a lot of users add items to their cart, but don’t complete checking out. Is there a correlation between the types of items customers aren’t purchasing? What about the time of day? Would a flash sale incentivize them?
We believe in a beginner, intermediate, advanced cycle when it comes to segmentation. Your greatest impact will be gradual—so get started slowly and ramp up to bigger successes.
Measuring Mobile KPIs
Depending on the ultimate goal of your app, how you measure success will vary. As we discussed earlier, you’ll want to set your Localytics goals to align with your larger business goals. Here are some examples you could use for engagement metrics:
- Sessions per user
- Push opt-in rate
- Session length
- Average sessions per user
These are all tracked in Localytics automatically—so you won’t need to build any additional events tagging to access this data.
For your revenue metrics you might want to measure:
- Total revenue/revenue per user
- Total number of conversions/conversion rate
- Subscribed users vs. trial users
- Revenue per acquisition source
The biggest thing about measuring mobile KPIs is making sure they align with your business goals. Many events are tracked out of the box with the Localytics SDKs, so reach out to your MEC or our support team if you’re interested in more information.
Building a Custom Dashboard
By default, Localytics will track a few different metrics on your Welcome Screen. But maybe the Welcome Screen doesn’t quite align with your top-level metrics. Or maybe you just want to see more data at a glance.
That’s where Custom Dashboard come in!
Custom Dashboards give you access to data that is otherwise buried in your dashboard. You can add just about any report to your custom dashboard with the SAVE tool on any analytics data. You can also create multiple dashboards to leverage different data.
After you’ve created a Custom Dashboard, you can schedule that data to arrive in your inbox whenever you need it. Set up an email cadence for your data on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Just navigate to the SAVE option from the top of your dashboard and choose Schedule emails.
Next Steps
You’ve sent your first push notification, built a custom dashboard, and gotten your feet wet with segmentation. You’re already up and running with Localytics!
Next up, try building an Audience to send another push message to, so you can start segmenting more thoroughly. Or try out our In-App Builder to build a custom in-app message to greet your users when they open your app. You can try adding some user onboarding or creating a “soft ask” for enabling push notifications.
There will never be a shortage of ways to surprise and delight your audience and help them to connect with your organization on a deeper level. So get going—start crafting the perfect message, and get out there!
