MarfeelPush – The Latest Feature in an End-to-End Solution for Publishers

Simply put, PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are the next step in the evolution of the mobile web – the homo sapiens to history’s neanderthal.

For some time, the challenge for mobile web developers was resolving how to get the best of native applications – the fast loading times, the smoothness, and the powerful features – on the web. The technology to make this happen was lacking. While native app users showed strong engagement, native app downloads have been steadily decreasing. In fact, the average American now downloads zero apps per month.

The need for a solution

The solution was simple. Develop the technology to integrate and support those features for the mobile web to leverage the high engagement, and in turn, the improved ad revenue that it produces.

And that’s exactly what PWAs have done for the mobile ecosystem.

Beyond the increase in page speed, the adoption of PWAs has finally given publishers and users alike, the sleek UX and loaded features of native applications to a mass audience over the web.

This has been made possible by the support for service workers across mobile browsers and operating systems, empowering publications with offline capabilities and the ability to add the site to a user’s home screen – helping publishers add lifetime value to traffic and boost engagement.

Push notifications over the web

One of the shiniest, and most lucrative features of PWAs is the ability to send notifications over the web and drive traffic back to a publication.

Push notifications were initially pioneered on Blackberry devices in 2003 when “Blackberry Push Email” started to alert users to new emails, playing a big part in making Blackberry phones the go-to choice for the corporate world.

It wasn’t until six years later—two years after the release of the iPhone—that the Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) was launched.

This powerful technique to boost traffic and engage with a publisher’s audience was then limited to native applications and the minimal users that downloaded them. That is, until now.

PWAs have changed the game. With a Marfeel PWA, push notifications can now be sent to the rich and extensive traffic over the mobile web that takes engagement to whole new level. In fact, some Marfeel partners with PWAs that actively use push notifications see 10% of their total visits coming from this traffic source. 

MarfeelPush 

That’s why Marfeel has developed MarfeelPush and seamlessly integrated this feature into the Marfeel platform: it's another loaded feature of a Marfeel PWA that gives our publishing partners the ability to drive users to their publication, amongst the other powerful characteristics of a Marfeel PWA that include:

  • A UX that nurtures the reader to drive key engagement metrics like session time and pageviews
  • Loading times in the top 1% of the fastest sites on the internet
  • A sophisticated ad setup that is integrated with the top ad exchanges, ad servers, and ad networks in the ecosystem
  • Off the shelf implementations with the top traffic acquisition channels like AMP
  • And now, the ability to send push notifications directly from Insight

This is part of our commitment to give publishers an end-to-end solution for the mobile web that gives them all the tools to enrich the UX for their audience, keep them on their site longer, make more money, and bring in new readers to share their resonating content with them.

MarfeelPush contributes to this mission because:

  • It’s harmonized with the Marfeel UI our publishing partners are familiar with. It makes drafting, scheduling, and sending push notifications an intuitive, plug and push process.
  • It provides one consolidated feature for a Marfeel publishing partner to reach their entire audience, regardless of the device or channel they’re on. That means push notifications can be sent to both desktop and mobile users, and native app and web readers at the same time.
  • It gives publishers the rich and insightful metrics to understand how their notifications are driving traffic back to their site and making them money through an elegant reporting dashboard.
  • It’s another sophisticated tool to help publishers cut through the noise, reach their audience, and drive traffic to their publication.

Sending your first push notification is an effortless process. To see how to get started, click https://marfeel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ATN/pages/169096824.

Marfeel Automatic Push

Although push notifications are an excellent way to engage with your readers, getting the right balance between 'engaging' and 'spammy' can be a challenge.

That's why the Audience team at Marfeel has developed a powerful formula to ensure maximum engagement from automatic push notifications.
The formula takes into account:
  • The best time of day to send push notifications
  • The best message to engage subscribers
  • The optimal amount of pushes each subscriber should receive per day
  • Whether each subscriber should receive the same amount of pushes per day
  • The most relevant articles and content to send to subscribers

After weeks of A/B testing, we developed a machine learning algorithm that takes all these important factors into account. The algorithm will constantly learn over time so that automatic push notifications provide the right message at the right time to your subscribers, increasing your page views and revenue.

Automatic push notifications are eligible to all our partners. However, if at any point you wish to turn off Marfeel Automatic Push, you can do so under the Notifications tab in Marfeel Insight.

Using meta tags for greater control

As a publisher, there is a way to take some control on what is pushed by Marfeel's automatic push notification strategy. By using a couple of meta tags, you can have control on whether an article is pushed or not and if done, what will be the message.

  • mrf-pushable meta tag

Via the meta tag mrf-pushable, you can configure an article so that it will not be elegible to become a push notification. By default, all articles are candidate to be pushed, but, if the metatag mrf-pushable is set to false, the article will never be pushed.

Example

If an article contains the following meta tag, it won't be pushed automatically by Marfeel.

<META name="mrf-pushable" content="false">


  • mrf-pushdescription meta tag

Moreover, you can decide what the push notification message will be. By default, Marfeel chooses the best message among Twitter titles, Facebook messages

and HTML titles. In any case, you can decide what the push notification message will be by setting a meta tag named mrf-pushdescription.

Example

If an article, eligible to be pushed, contains the following meta tag, a push notification will be sent with the set message.

<META name="mrf-pushdescription" content="A push summary that is going to be set as message">


Marfeel Push is available for publishers with Marfeel PWAs which means they must be HTTPS compliant. For more information regarding Marfeel PWAs, see this article.