While any given alert will drive some traffic to a publisher through clicks, the direct traffic is not the main value of push alerts to publishers. AP's app traffic from alert clicks in 2021 was only 3-4% of total page views for the year. A case study of The Dallas Morning News by notifications provider Pushly showed alerts drove just 4% of total page views.
Rather than traffic, the primary benefit of push alerts to publishers is loyalty and lifetime value. Notifications serve as a re-engagement tool that keeps users coming back, which can increase the average revenue per user over time in ad-based models.
At the Wall Street Journal, the data clearly showed that the more subscribers engaged with alerts, the less likely they were to cancel a subscription, said Drew Stoneman, now a project director at the AP and formerly a vice president of marketing then commercial strategy at the Journal.
Stoneman pointed out that the boost in engagement at the Wall Street Journal wasn’t just a 1:1 relationship between an alert and the story it promoted. “It is also worth noting that alerts played a pivotal role in getting readers to spend more time in the app -- meaning once they engaged through the alert, readers would then move on to other stories. So while there was a consumer lifetime-value benefit, there was also an additional benefit to ad revenue.”
Re-engaging existing users also counterbalances the churn of acquiring new users, boosting the stability of the user base and creating brand value.
A study on mobile notifications from the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin showed 27% of those asked to install an app with notifications used it at least daily compared to only 12% of those asked to install an app without notifications.
In the Dallas Morning News example, alerts drove 11% of return visits and a 5% increase in paid subscriptions, connecting alerts to revenue beyond ads.
The Associated Press doesn’t offer paid subscriptions so lifetime value for a user is measured purely in ad revenue at the AP. That math looks like this:
Lifetime value of a user = average revenue per unit x 1/churn.
For example, if AP’s average 30-day churn rate is 11.3% and the average revenue per unit in the AP News app is 12 cents, then lifetime value = .12 x 1/.113 = $1.06.
With many survey participants telling us they have between two and five news apps installed, alerts are one way news organizations can differentiate themselves from the crowd and draw users to their apps.
A 2017 collaborative report between the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Guardian U.S. Mobile Lab found that push alerts, when done well, differentiate and strengthen brands.
Posted on Columbia Journalism Review, that report says: “Many news outlets have come to view push alerts—with their unique ability to directly reach an audience, to divert them away from third-party platforms and back toward their own consumer apps, and to build brand loyalty and develop news habits—as one of their most powerful weapons in the fight against the Big Two, Google and Facebook.”