Posted By Tamzin Taylor, Partner Development at Google Play
Major sporting, cultural, political events present an opportunity to re-engage
users if you can find a relevant and unique way to serve them information. For
example, The
Guardian was able to substantially increase user engagement with its mobile
app during the recent US election by using new notifications functionality in
Android 7.0 Nougat. While notifications themselves are nothing new, The Guardian
used innovative techniques and design elements to give their users a rich, real
time update on the election results as they happened.
- How The Guardian innovated with notifications
Users who opted-in received a single, continuously updating notification which
was persistent on their lock screen as results came in on election night. The
notification used avatars of the candidates and a progress bar to bring the
information to life.
The notification showed the most up-to-date numbers of electoral votes won and
states called, an indication of which swing states have been called, and the
breakdown of the popular vote between the two leading candidates.
"Having the ability to have a constantly updating notification on screen,
allowed us to keep our users engaged throughout election night".
– Rob Phillips from The Guardian
Another important feature was the ability to notify users of major updates with
a link to detailed information and analysis. In order to do this, the Guardian
allowed the newsroom teams to push notifications of major events, such as when
the 270 vote mark was passed.
"Our newsroom could let our readers know in real time when there was a
serious milestone, and we were able to deliver 101 unique notifications during
the course of the evening. The clear menu options acted as key drivers
to our journalism as the news unfolded, and meant we could get our readers
connected with our content when they were most receptive".
– Rob Phillips from The Guardian
- Results and next steps
The engagement results were impressive:
- 170K people signed up to see the alert, with 122K users interacting with the
alert - The average number of interactions was around 620K, or 5.1 per user
- 74% of users who saw the notification tapped through to the main live blog
- 25% of users who saw the notification tapped through to our full results
content
Finally, perhaps the most impressive statistic is that promoting live updates
(via the notification) resulted in 103% increase in daily
installs during election week.
"By providing our users with the ability to quickly and easily check
information, to highlight major moments and to direct people to where to find
more information, we can deliver value to our readers, helping them make sense
of the events wherever they are, quickly and succinctly. After all, that's what
we're here to do as a news company, and we're delighted that the new
functionality on Nougat lets us do that"
– Rob Phillips from The Guardian
On the back of the success of using Android
N capabilities for live notifications, the Guardian plans to test the same
approach with sports content, and explore how it could be applied more
extensively to other major events like The Oscars and the Super Bowl.
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