How can I target specific users for a messaging campaign?

Suppose you want to send a message to a specific device to validate that you have push messaging properly configured, or that you want to launch a message to a specific list of users that you have identified outside of Localytics. This is possible with Localytics, though it is important to understand exactly how this works both to ensure your app is set up properly and so that, if you don't see the expected results, you can troubleshoot quickly.

First some pre-requisites:

• Make sure that your app is configured properly for Localytics push messaging, as described in our Developer Documentation (iOS, Android).

• Make sure you or your developers have uploaded a valid push certificate for your app in the Localytics Settings page (as detailed in the Developer Documentation).

• Make sure that any device you intend to target has successfully completed a session in a version of the app with Localytics installed.

In order to target a specific user or set of users:

• Localytics allows your app to optionally assign an identity to users that interact with your app which can subsequently be used for targeting purposes. For example, if I use your app and your app knows me as User12345 then the app can tell Localytics this by calling [Localytics setCustomerId:@"User12345"]; on iOS or similarly Localytics.setCustomerId("User12345"); on Android (iOS, Android). Localytics refers to these identifiers as Customer IDs. If your app is configured to identify users and Localytics has the Customer ID on record, you can target based on this.

• To target campaigns to a specific Customer ID, you have two options. If you're comfortable with APIs, we have a straightforward Push Messaging API that allows you to target push messages to specific Customer IDs.

• If APIs aren't your thing, you can achieve the same result in a few simple steps. First, you assign an attribute to the Customer IDs you want to message, then limit the target Audience to include only users with that attribute. For example, to target User12345 you could assign an attribute to this user called Test Audience with a value of True. This can be easily achieved by uploading attributes via a CSV file. Once you've done this, you simply create an Audience like so: