Announcing Big Changes for Data-Driven Marketers

Almost a year ago, we launched True Impact, which revolutionized the way that marketers measure the performance of their campaigns. Today, we are happy to announce that over the next few months, we will be introducing the next generation of campaign reporting tools. These tools will make it easier than ever for our customers to quickly understand how their campaigns are driving changes in their app’s performance.

It all starts today with three changes to the Localytics Campaign Builder:

1. We are introducing a new step at the beginning of the Campaign Builder called Goals, which is critical to unlocking a lot of the features we will be introducing in coming months.

2. We are making it easier than ever to use our conversion event tracking.

3. We are making some changes to control groups that will ensure more of your campaigns have the best campaign performance reporting possible.

Introducing Goals

The next time you build a new messaging campaign in Localytics, you will be greeted with the Goals screen you see below.

The idea behind Goals is simple: every marketing campaign has an objective or goal - something that you’re trying to achieve. That goal can be anything from driving more revenue to increasing the number of users who have enabled push notifications. By knowing what the goal is for your campaign, we will be able to provide:

• Better benchmarking data - One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from marketers is that it’s tough to gauge a campaign’s performance. With Goals, we will be able to provide you with industry and overall benchmarks that make it easy to see how your campaign stacks up.
  
  
• Customized campaign reports - Since we know what impact you want your campaign to have, we can customize our campaign reports to highlight the insights you care about most. For example, if your goal is to re-engage users, then we will create a report that puts the number of re-engaged users front and center.
  
  
• Cross-campaign comparisons - It’s common for an app to run multiple campaigns that share the same objective. Thanks to Goals, we will be able to show you which campaigns are driving the best results. For example, we will be able tell you whether the campaign promoting free shipping or the campaign promoting 10% off is doing a better job at driving purchases.

Which Goal Should I Choose?

We talked with dozens of customers and evaluated hundreds of campaigns in order to ensure that we provided options for Goals that encompassed all the potential objectives you could have for your campaigns. Here’s a brief rundown of the six options and when they should be used:

 
Although we believe we’ve provided a set of goals that are broad and diverse enough to apply to every campaign you might create, we’re always interested in hearing your feedback, so let us know if there’s a situation that you think we’ve missed!

Using Conversion Event Tracking is Easier than Ever

A conversion event is a specific action that you want users to perform after they receive a campaign. For example, let’s say you are building an onboarding campaign that encourages users to enable push notifications. In this case, you would probably set the conversion event to be a user changing their app settings to enable push notifications. When you set a conversion event in Localytics, we are able to provide insights about how effective your campaign was at driving users to perform the desired action.

Today, we are introducing several changes that make specifying a conversion event easier.  First, we are allowing you to set a conversion event on the Goals screen. In the past, you could only select a conversion event on the True Impact page after a campaign went live. Although you can also still change the conversion event on the True Impact page, we have included the ability to select a conversion event on the Goals screen because it is so closely tied to a campaign’s goal.

Because they can be so useful, starting today, Localytics will automatically recommend a conversion event based on the events you’ve used for past campaigns that were run in the same channel. For example, if you’re building a push campaign, Localytics will automatically pre-select a conversion event based on the event you selected for your last push campaign. If you’d like, you can change the event or disable conversion tracking completely with one click.

What Changes are Happening to Control Groups?

We introduced the concept of control groups to Localytics when we launched True Impact last year. As a reminder, a control group is a portion (5%) of a campaign’s audience that doesn’t receive a message. If you’re trying to understand why it’s a good idea to not send a message to 5% of your audience, check out this blog post, where we discuss the awesomeness that is control groups.

Today we are introducing two changes. First, we are changing our standard campaign settings so that control groups are enabled by default. However, as much as we love control groups, we also realize that there are situations where you need to send a message to every member of an audience. In that situation, we don’t want you to leave the control group enabled by accident. To avoid this scenario, we’ve also added a switch for the control group to the Audience screen in the campaign builder, so that you can easily disable it when needed. If you’re wondering when you should disable the control group, be sure to check out the blog post we mentioned earlier.

This is the Start of Something Special

When we introduced True Impact, we dramatically changed the way that marketers measure the performance of their campaigns. With today’s changes, we are laying the groundwork for another seismic shift that will redefine the meaning of data-driven marketing. We hope you’re excited, because we certainly are.