Stats and monitoring for web push notifications

You can monitor web push notifications and aggregate the stats in different ways. For example you can see the number of web push notifications sent successfully and the number of clicks.

See the stats for a single notification

You can see detailed stats for each notification that you have sent from the Pushpad dashboard. Go to your project, then click Notifications and open a notification to see the details.

You can also fetch the stats with the REST API. When you send a notification, you get in response the new notification ID: you can use it later to fetch the notification stats. Otherwise you can also get all the notifications that you have recently sent.

Notification log

For applications that integrate Pushpad through the API, it can be useful to log all the notifications sent:

1. When you send a notification, you get in response the ID of the new notification
2. Store the notification ID and other details in your application logs, so that you can search them later

Then, when you need to inspect the delivery of a message:

1. Get the notification ID from your application logs
2. Open the notification on Pushpad, so that you can see all the notification details and information about the delivery status. From the Pushpad dashboard go to your project, then click Notifications and enter the notification ID in the search field. You can also use the API if you prefer.

See the stats for a project

You can see aggregated stats for your project from the Pushpad dashboard. Go to your project, then click Stats.

You can see the stats for the notifications and for the subscriptions. You can also show advanced stats about the notification delivery by selecting Show details.

Aggregate the stats for multiple notifications into categories

If you send many notifications from the dashboard or even millions of notifications through the API, it becomes difficult to see the stats for each notification. In that case you must use the project stats, that aggregate the stats from multiple notifications. By default, there is one bucket where all the notification stats are collected. However you can easily create other buckets to aggregate the stats only from some notifications.

For example a newspaper may create the categories "sport" and "politics", then tag each notification with the appropriate category and finally compare the CTR of the different categories.

In order to aggregate the stats in custom categories you can follow these steps:

1. Go to the project settings and enter the name of the new metric in the Custom metrics field. The name can only contain letters, digits and underscores, including Unicode characters, and cannot be longer than 50 characters. You can create up to 50 metrics for a project.
2. When you send a notification, enter the name of your metric in the Custom metrics field. Note that you can add up to 3 metrics for a single notification.
3. Go to the project stats and select your metric. Basically you need to click No filter and select the name of your metric instead. In this way you will see only the stats for the notifications that were tagged with that metric name.

Filter the notifications

You can use the dashboard to filter the notifications based on their categories.

First you need to create a custom metric, as described in the previous section, then you can go to Notifications and show the notifications inside that specific bucket.

When you filter the notifications using this method, you can see the last 100 notifications for each category.

Delivery status

Pushpad collects detailed information about the delivery of each notification. The following stats are available:

• Scheduled: it has a different meaning depending on context. For the project stats it represents the total number of notifications that you have sent (regardless of the delivery status). If you open the details of a single notification this metric represents the number of notifications that are in the Pushpad sending queue. Usually queues last at most a few seconds, however if you send millions of notifications in bulk, then a queue can last for some minutes. Sometimes you can also note that most notifications are reported as successfully sent immediately, while a small fraction of them takes more seconds to be processed: that means that Pushpad is performing automatic retries for some recipients.
• Expired: the number of subscriptions that have been deleted because they were expired. This usually happens when the users unsubscribe from notifications from the browser preferences.
• Invalid Push Service: the number of deliveries that failed because the browser push service is unknown or banned and thus Pushpad cannot communicate with it.
• Invalid Subscription: the number of deliveries that failed because the browser push service (e.g. Mozilla autopush for Firefox, FCM for Chrome, WNS for Edge, Apple Push Notification service for Safari) reported that the subscription does not exist.
• Unsuccessful: the number of deliveries that failed for other reasons. You can contact support if you need more details.
• Successfully Sent: the number of notifications that were sent successfully by Pushpad to the browser push service (e.g. Mozilla autopush for Firefox, FCM for Chrome, WNS for Edge, Apple Push Notification service for Safari). This means that the browser push service confirms that the notification is successfully received and that it will try to deliver it to the end device as soon as the device becomes online.
• Opened: the number of notifications that were clicked. This includes any click on the notification or on the action buttons.
• CTR: the Click-Through Rate is the ratio of users who click the notification to the number of total users who have received the notification. It is calculated as Opened / Successfully Sent.