How Google Play Optimizes Notifications in Games
Original post Optimizing Notifications in Games
Article Summary
Google Play analyzed platform-wide notification data across all games and found something surprising: more notifications actually hurt retention.
Ryan Richmond from Google Play shares data-driven insights on push notification performance in mobile games. The analysis reveals clear correlations between notification strategy and key metrics like retention and DAU return rates.
Key Takeaways
- Games with high notification interaction rates show stronger Day 1-28 retention
- Sending more daily notifications correlates with higher opt-out rates
- Increased notification volume negatively impacts Day 1 install retention
- Android P makes it one-click easy to see which apps spam notifications
Quality beats quantity: games that send fewer, more relevant notifications see better retention and engagement than those that blast users with high-volume messaging.
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What This Article Covers
Game developers didn't have a clear way to measure which push notifications actually worked. It was hard to tell which approaches improved performance across their players.
Ryan Richmond created a framework that measured notification effectiveness by tracking interaction rate percentage. This included users who expanded notification details or opened the app through notifications. It let developers compare results across Google Play titles using actual data.
The metric showed that games with high notification interaction rates had better Day 1-28 retention and higher DAU return rates. Developers now had a specific target to work toward when optimizing their notifications.
This page summarizes “Optimizing Notifications in Games” by Google Play, published Jul 14, 2020. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
