Facebook Imposes New Rules For The Notifications API

Developers have been seeing some pretty positive results from the Notifications API. That’s the report today from Facebook as the social network updates us on the latest numbers from those participating in the beta that was announced back in August.

If you’re not familiar with the new Notifications API, it’s essentially a method in which developers can send messages directly to players. Instead of having to wait for a player to boot up their game or see an email, the developer can send messages to the player via their notification feed on Facebook proper.

Facebook reports that developers sending “high quality notifications” to active users are seeing click through rates of 25 percent or higher. They point out that this is significantly higher than traditional direct response channels like email. One developer in particular, KIXEYE, sees a 30 percent click through rate with War Commander.

As said before, the key to getting such a high click through rate is to craft high quality notifications. As such, Facebook will now be implementing two new quality control measures for notifications on November 9:

No sending notifications to inactive users. Apps should only send notifications to users who have visited their app in the last 28 days. Data shows that user engagement drops sharply after this time and raises the risk your app will be flagged as spam.

High volume senders must maintain a minimum click-to-impression ratio. Apps sending a high volume of notifications must maintain a minimum 17% click-to-impression (CTI) ratio on notifications. Our data shows that apps with a CTI of 17% or higher will keep users coming back for a longer period of time. If your app dips below this threshold on a weekly basis, we may block access to notifications for your app.

For more information on these and other quality control measures, check out the documentation.

Since the introduction of the Notifications API, Facebook has also featured Insights into how well said notifications were doing. Now you can separate notifications into groups and track each one with a custom ref_param. This will help you evaluate the performance of separate notifications so you can improve user response.

The Notifications API is still in beta, but it looks like its coming along very well. Combined with the Mobile App Install Ads, developers now have more tools than ever to drive users to their apps.