Why are clickthrough rates on push notifications down dramatically? (5)
Why are clickthrough rates on push notifications down dramatically?
Here’s a question for all of you experts who build push notification lists and send out pushes. A year or so ago, whenever I would send out a push notification to my subscribers who’d joined in the last three days or so, I’d see click rates between 9-12%, then it would drop off over time. Now I barely see a 1% click rate. While subscription rates have dropped, they are certainly still in an acceptable range, but when I send outgoing pushes, the clickthrough rate is now nonexistent.
I’m still using OneSignal to collect push subscribers and send push notifications and I know that Google had an update in Feb that affected push. I never built a business around push, always used it as an adjunct (I’m an email marketer), but it was a nice revenue stream.
Anyone have any idea how to increase click rates, or is this just the “new normal” with that media?
A robust discussion of this would, I think, be helpful to everyone, others I’ve talked to say their subscription and clickthrough rates are down somewhat, but not to the level mine are.
It is the new normal and is expected to go down. Since more and more people collect push, starting with networks ending at affiliates themselves, people get blind to it.
The reasons in a nutshell:
- everybody and their mother collecting push and sending notifications, resulting in gazillion of messages delivered daily. Imagine someone subscribes to 4-5 networks who each sent just 6 messages a day, that's 30 messages a day (and every networks sends more)
- people finally realize there is no new message pending, they did not miss the call and the hot neighbour is not up for xxx...
- duplicate databases, everybody likely to opt-in most likely was hit with push spam already
- push turns into pretty much a bit more targeted pop, quality days are over unless you build lists from organic traffic, niche specific (and no, you won't be able to buy those in 99% of the cases as it's more valuable to monetize yourself for anybody collecting that way)
- more bots subscribing, let it be crawlers or bots created to get CPS rates paid
- 9/10 networks rebroker inventory, resulting in the same ads getting delivered over and over, very few networks have only in-house subscribers (whose quality will be better)
- the audience that affiliates get access to, sold by networks, is only still subscribed because they did not figure out how to unsubscribe - there's zero value provided to them for obvious reasons
- generally, unsubscription rates are increasing day by day
Originally Posted by fjk87
Thanks, definitely some good insight. My specific situation is I build an organic push list, mostly from email traffic, and while push subscription rates have decreased somewhat, the clickthroughs to my own personal broadcasts to my organically built, in house push list have dwindled to virtually nothing. I have a few friends who built their own push broadcast system (I still use OneSignal), build their own organic push lists from pretty much the same traffic I do, and they say their click through rates have not declined all that much.
So I would be curious as to whether anyone who has built their own organic push list has dealt with the same issue? I don't buy outside push notifications, just email blasts and some banner traffic.
I would say this is either a problem with your targeted audience then or some mistake in the setup if it really gets minimal. Don‘t forget though that any of your subscribers got spammed by networks and affiliates too, what I can tell you is that pretty much all networks and affiliates with significant lists that are farmed and not organic experience the same.
I am seeing newly collected users with CTRs of 4%-5%. Aged users in heavy send rotation at .5% or better. I think it depends on method of collection and frequency. Also weed of users generating impressions and never clicking.
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