FAQ

As part of the core functionality of Notificare, actions can be added to the content of your notifications, allowing users to interact with your messages and your app of recording these interactions. Actions will be shown under the form of buttons allowing you to provide extra functionality in a message. Actions can register a user's choice, allow them to provide text input, take a picture, open a browser, call a Webhook, make a phone call or send a sms or simply deep link or execute code in your app. Whenever your notifications include one or more actions, the Notificare SDKs will automatically register any interaction and display it for you, in the dashboard, as responses to your messages. By using actions you can easily capture user response without having to develop any functionality.

To bootstrap campaigns creation, Notificare allows your messages to use pre-defined action templates that combine rich content types and actions. By default we include templates that use all the types of rich content available in our platform, but you can also create your own action templates and customise even more your messaging strategy. This is ideal for apps that use recurrent types of messages and want to make faster content selection and smarter use of actionable notifications.

In Notificare an Active User is a user profile with one or more Devices. Active Users are eligible to receive remote, silent, or in-app notifications, email messages, or SMS messages. When registered anonymously, users will only have one single device.

As soon as the last device for a user has been unregistered, Notificare will proceed to inactivate the user.

Devices will be inactivated when:
- they are manually unregistered through the app;
- they are unsubscribed for Email or SMS;
- they are ultimately reported inactive by APNS, FCM, HMS, or WebPush providers whenever a user unsubscribes (WebPush);
- they are reported as a hard bounce for Email;
- carriers report them as unknown or no longer existing devices for SMS;
- a user uninstalls the app (APNS, FCM, HMS).

Users can also be automatically deactivated based on their last active date. Under Settings > Configure App > User Lifetime you can set the amount of time you consider a user active. By default this setting is set to Forever which means users will never be deactivated but you can decrease it to match your needs if you consider users with a last active date of a certain threshold (1, 3, 6 months or 1 year) are no longer important in your audience selection. If you change this setting, Notificare will automatically deactive users that were last active before the option you choose.

Stands for Apple Push Notification Service and is the force behind all push notifications delivered in iOS Devices and Safari browsers. Notificare provides a robust connection between APNS servers allowing your apps to scale the number of notifications without having to scale your infrastructure. APNS offers an authenticated and encrypted IP persistent connection between its servers and a iOS device or Safari Browser allowing devices to receive notifications even when your apps are not being used. When connecting a device to the APNS servers it will be provided a unique identifier which is used by Notificare to send notifications to devices.

Each Notificare app will automatically generate three different keys that should be used in both the SDK and API integrations. For the SDKs, only the Application Key and Application Secret should be used. These will authenticate your apps when making requests through the SDK. Never user the Master Secret in your apps. This key is reserved for API requests only and it will give anyone access to all the data, operations and rights of your application. This key should never be shared publicly and you should contact us immediately whenever you think this key as been compromised.

This metric is gathered by the Notificare SDKs by calculating the sum of all session’s length divided by the number of sessions (A = SUM(all session’s length in seconds) / all sessions). It is aggregated by the platform and displayed in time series in your app’s overview page. A session length is registered by calculating the amount of seconds between the app’s open and close event.

This metric is gathered by the Notificare SDKs as a property of a device. It is automatically registered with each device registration by capturing the app’s version provided in the app’s info.plist in iOS, versionName in AndroidManifest.xml for Android or the appVersion in the config.json for the JS SDK. The app’s versions are displayed in the Notificare’s dashboard in the form of a pie chart showing the current version fragmentation.

Smartphone and tablets with Bluetooth Low-Energy capabilities with iOS 7 and Android 4.3 installed can receive signals from BTLE devices also known as beacons or iBeacons. These devices can be used as micro regions providing location accuracy between 70 meters (approx. 229 feet) down to 20 centimetres (approx. 3.9 inches). This devices are usually powered by coin batteries or USB cables, allowing it to be placed nearly anywhere. Please note that because it relies in Bluetooth technology it is possible that elements like water, human body or metal surfaces can interfere with the signal broadcast by these devices. In Notificare beacons can extend interactions inside any region and register users’ behaviour in places where region monitoring can not.

In Notificare, devices are the core of your audience. Every unique smartphone, tablet or browser that accesses your apps will be registered as a device in Notificare. Devices can be registered without requesting any permission from the user, by default all platforms will provide our SDKs with a device token that identifies that unique device. In iOS and web apps, in order to show any native UI in teh device when a notification is received, users are required to accept notifications providing your apps the necessary permission to show remote notifications even when they are not using your applications. In Android this permission is request before hand when users first install your app. Please note that users have all the power and at any moment remote notifications can be disabled in the device’s settings.

In Notificare, users will be dwelling in a region or beacon whenever they first enter its area to the moment they leave it. This allows geo-triggers to provide a delay in minutes before they get executed. This is extremely useful if you wish to filter any visits to your regions or beacons that occur under a certain amount of time. When users dwell inside a region for a short amount of time (eg.: travelling too fast) you might not want to trigger certain notifications, allowing you to specifically target users that stay inside a region or beacon for a specific amount of time. Any delay provided in a geo-trigger must be specified in minutes, but please note that by default both iOS and Android will take up to 20 seconds to determine if a user entered or exited a region or beacon.

An app environment will determine which APNS server it should use. Notificare apps are divided in two types of environments, Development and Production. An app which is created for Development will communicate with APNS sandbox servers. This is reserved for apps built directly from Xcode into a device, only debug builds will retrieve a device token from APNS sandbox servers and those tokens must be registered to a Notificare app create with development environment. All other types of builds (Ad-Hoc, AppStore or Enterprise) must use a Notificare app which is created with a production environment. In Android and Web apps this distinction is not relevant and apps are not required to have a clear separation between environments although it is recommended.

Stands for Firebase Cloud Messaging and is the service used by Notificare to deliver notifications in Android devices and Chrome browsers. In 2016, FCM replace GCM as mechanism used to send notifications in Android. FCM operates by creating an authenticated and encrypted connection between its servers and users’ devices allowing apps running in Android and websites in Chrome and Opera to receive notifications even when they are not running. When connecting a device to the FCM servers it will be provided a unique identifier which is used by Notificare to send notifications to devices.

When invited by an existing paid account, unregistered email addresses can create free of charge accounts that can share an app’s management. Free accounts are limited in functionality and are not allowed to create apps. At any moment a free account can upgrade to a paid account and gain access to all the functionality of a paid plan.

Stands for Google Cloud Messaging and is the service used by Notificare to deliver notifications in Android devices and Chrome browsers. GCM operates by creating an authenticated and encrypted connection between its servers and users’ devices allowing apps running in Android and websites in Chrome to receive notifications even when they are not running. When connecting a device to the GCM servers it will be provided a unique identifier which is used by Notificare to send notifications to devices. IN 2016, GCM was replace by FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging).

Location based triggers are interactions that can be created whenever a device enters or leaves a certain region or is in the vicinity of a beacon. These triggers can be set to generate a remote notification or simply be used to add/remove users to/from a segment or add/remove devices to/from tags. These interaction allow your app to engage or categorise your audience based on your customer visits to your stores or venues.

This is a combined metric shown by Notificare’s dashboard which provides an overview of your notifications influence in the way your app is used, by comparing side by side the number of times your app is opened, how many times notifications are opened and how many times notifications are open when the app was not active, showing the direct relationship between the engagement with messages and the usage of the app.

This is a metric collected by Notificare’s SDKs whenever a device installs and opens your app for the first time. This metric will always be registered whenever a device uninstalls your app and installs and opens it again. See also Uninstalls to understand how we also collect that metric.

This is a combined metric shown in Notificare’s dashboard that compares the number of installs, uninstalls and the number of active users. This combination will provide you a clear overview of your app’s performance.

In Notificare, a Major or region identifier is a unique number within your list of regions that serves to identify your region and the beacons created inside that region. All the beacons inside that region must be set to share that Major number in order to be visible in your mobile apps. This allows your app to only display the beacons for the region the user is inside.

In Notificare, a Minor or beacon identifier is a unique number within your list of beacons for a specific regions that identifies a beacon inside an application. These number must match a Minor already set in a beacon device or be configured as the Minor value of a beacon. In order to allow your app to recognised and monitor a specific beacon, configuring beacons with a Minor is a mandatory step.

A Pass Type ID is an identifier used by Apple Wallet ( formerly known as Passbook). Every pass needs to have a Pass Type ID and needs to be protected by a digital signature created using a corresponding Pass Type ID certificate. In order for Notificare to create Wallet compatible passes for you, it will require that you upload a pass certificate which is generated in Apple’s Developer Portal.

In Notificare, this is an essential configuration of Location Services in order to power proximity marketing using beacons. This value can be generated by Notificare and later configured in your beacon devices or simply match your existing beacons UUID. Each application can only use one Proximity UUID. Only when you provide a Notificare app with this value, you are then allowed to configured regions to use beacons.

As part of Notificare's location based services, your app can monitor visits to any point in the globe. A region should have a centre position based on the latitude and longitude intersection point and a radius varying between 50 meters (approx. 164 feet) and 50 kilometres (approx. 310 miles). Regions with both very large or very small radius will lose precision when used to track visitors in a certain area. For best results choose a radius between 100 meters (approx. 328 feet) and 2 kilometres (approx. 1.2 miles). Also take in account that GPS data will be inaccurate when users are inside buildings or WIFI stations are not in reach. In these cases we recommend the use of BTLE beacons as the source of your location based tracking or campaigns.

Different types of content can be stored in a notification. In Notificare these types can vary from simple alerts, HTML, web pages, images, video, maps or coupons. Due to limitations in the platforms this content will only be available whenever users click in notifications from the device’s notification centre or lock screen or, in case your app uses our inbox functionality, whenever a user opens a message from the inbox. You are also free to create your own content types but in this case you will need to handle these by yourself since our SDKs will ignore any unknown type.

This mechanism allows your applications to automate the way it categorises users or devices based on your users’ behaviour. These rules allow you to add or remove users or devices from segments or tags, respectively. They can be set whenever a user opens a notification, clicks an action, enter or leaves a region or beacon or simply whenever any automation event is executed. This is the easier way of categorising users without having to manage it yourself allowing users’ behaviour to do all the work.

To allow you to group users by a certain category, user profiles can be added or removed from segments through the Notificare dashboard or API. Segments can be used as a recipient of a message, allowing your app to send one single message to a group of users. When using segments as the recipient of a campaign, that campaign will be sent to all the devices of a user, if applicable. Users can also be added to a certain segment in bulk operations using the data importer. This is extremely useful for apps that already do this segmentation through 3rd party software like CRMs or ERMs and need to import these groups into Notificare.

This is a metric gathered by Notificare’s SDKs which is collected every time users open your applications. It will give you an overview of how many people use your app per hour, day or month, allowing you to match the effects of push notifications, offline and email campaigns have in your mobile and website audience.

Accounts in Notificare will display a list of apps that are owned by other Notificare accounts. As an owner of an app, you can share its management with other existing accounts or allow any unregistered email address to create a Free account in Notificare.

In Notificare this is a property stored in a notification to indicate the amount of seconds it should use to deliver a message to a device. By default this property will not be have any value which means that delivery will be attempted as APNS and GCM will see fit. But if you do see that a message is not relevant after a certain time and you want to limit its delivery (in case the device is off for a long period of time) you can provide a TTL and avoid that a message is delivered to a device that was turned on after that amount of time. Please note that APNS and GCM handle this value differently. In APNS, if no TTL is provided the message will be dropped after sometime (not documented by Apple) if it could not the deliver it. It is also important to know that APNS will only queue one message, meaning that if you send two messages while a device has been off, Apple will only deliver the last one. TTL in GCM can be set to a value up to a month but unlike APNS, GCM will queue up to 100 messages while the device is offline.

This is a mechanism only available through Notificare’s SDKs which allow your apps to categorise devices. Tags allow you to group devices based on app specific properties (eg.: type of device, user selected language, level reached in a game, user preferences, etc). Tags can then be used as the recipient of your messages allowing you to reach only specific devices independently of the user profiles they are associated with.

This is a metric collected by Notificare’s platform whenever APNS, GCM or WebSockets provide feedback in response to an attempt to deliver a notification to a device token that is no longer valid because the user uninstalled your app or disconnected the browser from our WebSockets server. This metric will be store as an event and subtracted to the number of installs in the Installs vs Users combined chart.

This is a combined metric shown in Notificare’s dashboard which compares side by side the number of installs, uninstalls and active users in one chart. This chart will give you a clear overview or your audience growth over time.

This is a metric collected by Notificare’s SDKs whenever a user enters and exits a certain region or beacon. Our SDK automatically registers these visitors soon a region or beacon is created and loaded in the app. Please note that whenever a new region or beacon is created the app must be launched or the user must move significantly (approx. 500 meters or 0.3 miles) so new regions or beacons are recognised and loaded in the app.

In modern browsers, it's the capability to send messages to subscribers of a website or web app even when the it is not in focus or open at all. It can be use to send and present content to a user or trigger the browser to update its content.