Not many saw web push notifications entering their revenue dashboards when the channel was first launched in 2015. Today, the buzzword has become an essential part of the revenue targets for most marketing teams. No wonder, the leading ad networks are setting up solutions to jump into this. Push notifications are competing with conventional marketing channels and (to say the least) are delivering a comparatively higher CTR as well. While the list of push notification ad-networks is long, it is important for publishers to understand the process of selecting the right partner. We at iZooto, now help 100’s of large publishers and here is the checklist that what we recommend to our publisher partners as they select their push notification ad-network.

Audience Ownership

For long, publishers have been dependent on the walled gardens to build and engage what they considered as “their” audience, only to realize that their traffic stats are the mercy of algorithm updates. This is exactly why the narrative over the years has shifted to building and owning an audience and not renting it from Facebook. This is what truly makes push notifications and email exciting - the domain, your site visitors are subscribing to, decides who gets to own the audience.

Does the domain that your users are subscribing to, belong to you or the ad-network?
Ownership of your audience is the single most important factor that should impact your choice. One of the biggest advantages of using email and web push notifications is that you can leverage your own your audience and over time reduce your dependency on the social channels such as Facebook and take charge of your traffic sources. Don't throw this away. Some ad-networks practice the exact opposite and build an audience for themselves, leaving the publisher high and dry. Watch out for these cases.

Browser Compatibility

Every publisher is unique and caters to a unique audience. Some would have users coming in only from Android using Chrome and Opera while some would have a Desktop heavy audience using only Firefox and Safari. While choosing your push notification solution, you must ensure that it supports all leading browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Not covering a browser which is used by 5% of your audience, would imply leaving money on the table.

Here’s what the audience, for a website with 100,000 monthly unique visitors, would look like over a period of 6 months.

Subscription Experience

Your ad revenue is directly related to the size of the audience and that is directly related to the kind of experience you are able to create for your site visitors. Curating a great experience for your site visitors is what will help you increase your conversion rate.

Content First and Then Ads

Push notification ads help you monetize, which is why you are reading this. But the reason your site visitors hit that “Allow” button is not to get ads. As a loyal reader your expectation is to get new content alerts, breaking news, discount offers from the publisher and not ads. It is important to acknowledge that push notification ads are in the face and too many ads can catalyze churn. While it is you who is investing in building an audience, you need to ensure that you are not killing the goose that will give you golden eggs.

Let's face it - no one likes the idea of subscribing to “just ads”. That has never worked and never will for your audience. It is important that your audience gets what they subscribed for i.e content updates and alerts. And not just ads. The key lies in having the ability to push content to your audience - consistently. So, do ensure that the ad network that you are working with gives you the ability to push notifications to your audience and engage them. Go through these checks before engaging your audience with web push notifications. And hey - remember, more engagement automatically generates revenue.

Watch this video that talks about to know how not to monetize your audience.

Subscriber Migration

Unlike email lists, migrating your push notification audience is not as straightforward but it is still possible. Now, you don’t necessarily have to build this capability in-house but to ensure that the subscriber migration is easy and smooth, you must ensure that you are using your own FCM Project before you enable push notifications on your website. This gives you the flexibility of exporting and importing subscribers. Obviously, you can’t migrate or export subscribers if they have subscribed to a different domain. So if you get #1 wrong, migration of subscribers is not possible. 

If you are already using a service provider, this article outlines what it takes to migrate your push notification subscribers.