If you are a user of Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), you know that there are many different ways to send messages. You can target an application on a device, or target millions of them through the topics API. FCM APIs tell you if there was a failure during the acceptance of the request by returning an error code and an explanation for the failure, but this only covers the part of the request between you and the FCM backend. What happens after FCM accepts your message request?
In this post, we will look into the Firebase Cloud Messaging infrastructure and how messages are actually delivered to devices.
When FCM returns a successful response to your API request, it simply means that FCM will start trying to deliver this message to the device or to the service responsible for delivering the message to the device (for example: Apple Push Notification service for delivery to iOS devices or Mozilla Push Service for delivery to Firefox browsers). It will try this until:
Note: If the time to live of the pending messages has expired, the above functions will not be triggered.
There are many factors that affect the actual delivery of the message to the device and the amount of information FCM can provide about the delivery.
Note: If you'd like to analyze message delivery events for your project, you can do so by exporting FCM data into BigQuery.
On iOS, there are two ways in which FCM can send a message to a device:
Note: If you'd like to access iOS notification delivery information for display notifications, you can use the FCM Reporting Dashboard. This dashboard leverages Google Analytics for Firebase data sharing features to collect delivery information through Firebase Android and iOS SDKs for display notifications.
See Lifetime of a Message and Understanding Message Delivery if you'd like to learn more about message acceptance and delivery.
This article originally appeared on the Google Marketing Platform blog.
For businesses to make the best decisions about where to invest their marketing budget, it's critical that they understand user behavior on both their web and app properties. And while a website is often the first customer touchpoint, for many businesses, apps are where customers are spending more of their time. As a result, marketers need to capture audience insights from their app analytics that they can then take action on, both within and outside of their apps.
Google Analytics for Firebase, our app analytics solution, has historically given you the ability to organize your audiences around events, device type, and other dimensions. These criteria were not exhaustive, however, or dynamic as user behavior changed over time.
That's why we've made enhancements to the audience builder experience, with a few major updates to help you identify relevant app audiences more easily and with greater precision:
These new tools make audiences more powerful, flexible and actionable than before, so you can be confident that your insights reflect relevant users and activity on your apps. In 2019, we will continue to enhance the Google Analytics for Firebase audience builder, offering even more ways to precisely create audiences.
Take action once you've identified relevant audiences
Once you've improved your understanding of users, you can also deliver personalized experiences based on varying user needs. For example, through push notifications or Remote Config in Firebase, or customized ads in Google Ads.
Let's say you have an e-commerce app. Using these advanced audience capabilities, you can build an audience of users that visit your app for the first time and add an item to their cart, but don't make a purchase—and only include those who do so in a 30 day window.
Build a dynamic audience for first time users that have abandoned their cart.
You can now reach that audience with tailored messaging relevant to their experience with the app, and encourage them to make the purchase through an in-app promotion, email notification, or personalized ad. Once these users have returned to the app, made a purchase, and/or exceeded the 30 day window however, they will no longer meet the criteria for that audience, and you will not adversely affect their experience with marketing that is no longer relevant to them.
With the ability to create dynamic audiences, you are able to understand your users with better precision. A better view into your audiences means more insight into the customer journey, so you can invest in your marketing activities with confidence and see better results—keeping users happy, and your app growing.
