By Jamila AkbarUnderstanding user behavior is paramount in digital marketing, and Braze, a leading customer engagement platform, offers powerful tools for push notification analytics. Without deep engagement insights, your carefully crafted messages are just noise. This tutorial will walk you through leveraging Braze’s analytics suite to transform raw data into actionable strategies, ensuring your push notifications truly resonate and drive conversions. Are your push notifications actually working, or are they just annoying your users?
Key Takeaways
- Access the “Campaign Analytics” dashboard in Braze to monitor real-time push notification performance metrics like sends, opens, and conversions.
- Utilize Braze’s “Funnels” feature to map user journeys post-notification, identifying drop-off points and optimizing conversion paths.
- Segment your audience within Braze’s “Audience Analytics” to understand how different user groups interact with your push notifications, refining targeting strategies.
- A/B test push notification content and timing diligently within Braze to continuously improve engagement rates by 15% or more.
- Implement custom event tracking for specific in-app actions to gain granular insights into post-notification user behavior and attribute revenue accurately.
Step 1: Setting Up Your Push Notification Campaign for Analytics Readiness
Before you even think about analyzing, you need to ensure your campaigns are built to provide meaningful data. This isn’t just about sending a message; it’s about creating a measurable interaction. I’ve seen countless teams launch campaigns without proper tracking in place, only to be left guessing about their effectiveness. That’s a recipe for wasted ad spend and frustrated marketers.
1.1 Configure Campaign Goals and Conversion Events
In Braze, when creating a new push notification campaign, navigate to Campaigns > Create New Campaign > Push Notification. After defining your message content and target audience, proceed to the Goals section. Here, you must explicitly define your campaign’s primary goal. This could be a specific in-app purchase, a content view, or a subscription. Select “Track a specific conversion event” and choose the relevant event from your pre-defined custom events list. For instance, if your goal is to drive sign-ups, select “User_Signed_Up”.
Pro Tip: Always set a clear, measurable goal. If you don’t know what success looks like, you can’t analyze it. I always push my clients to define these before we even start drafting copy.
1.2 Implement Custom Event Tracking for Granular Insights
Beyond the primary conversion, consider tracking secondary actions. Within your app’s codebase, ensure you’re logging custom events for all critical user actions. For example, if your push notification promotes a new product line, track events like “Product_Page_Viewed,” “Added_To_Cart,” and “Checkout_Initiated.” These events, once implemented, will appear in Braze under Data > Custom Events. This level of detail allows you to build sophisticated funnels later on.
Common Mistake: Relying solely on default “app open” metrics. An app open tells you nothing about what the user did after opening. You need specific event tracking to understand true engagement.
1.3 Utilize Campaign Tags and Control Groups
Under the Settings tab of your campaign, you’ll find the option to add Campaign Tags. Use these tags strategically (e.g., “Promo_Winter2026,” “New_Feature_Launch”) to categorize your campaigns for easier filtering and analysis later. More importantly, always, and I mean always, set up a Control Group. Braze allows you to allocate a percentage of your audience (typically 5-10%) to a control group that will not receive the push notification. This is non-negotiable for understanding the true incremental impact of your campaigns. You’ll find this option under the Target Audiences section when setting up your campaign. Select “Add Control Group” and specify the percentage.
Expected Outcome: By implementing these foundational steps, your push notification campaigns will generate rich, attributable data, allowing for accurate performance measurement against a baseline.
Step 2: Navigating Braze’s Campaign Analytics Dashboard
Once your campaigns are live and data is flowing, the real work begins: understanding what that data means. Braze’s Campaign Analytics dashboard is your command center for this.
2.1 Accessing the Campaign Overview
From the Braze dashboard, click on Campaigns in the left navigation menu. Then, select the specific campaign you wish to analyze. This will open the campaign’s individual overview page. Here, you’ll immediately see high-level metrics such as Sends, Opens, Conversions, and Revenue (if applicable). Pay close attention to the Conversion Rate and Revenue Per User, as these are often the most telling indicators of a campaign’s success.
Pro Tip: Don’t just look at the raw numbers. Compare them against your control group data, which is readily available on this same overview page, to truly grasp the campaign’s incremental value. This is where you see if your push notification actually moved the needle, or if users would have converted anyway.
2.2 Deep Diving into Engagement Metrics
Below the overview, you’ll find detailed charts and tables for various engagement metrics. Look for sections like “Messages Sent & Opened”, “Conversions”, and “Revenue”. You can adjust the date range at the top right of the dashboard to analyze performance over specific periods. Filter by Message Type (e.g., “Initial Push,” “Follow-up Push”) if your campaign has multiple message steps. I personally find the “Opens by Device” breakdown incredibly useful for understanding if certain device types are more receptive, which can inform future targeting.
Case Study: Last year, I worked with an e-commerce client promoting a flash sale. Their initial push notification saw a 12% open rate. By segmenting their audience and analyzing engagement by device, we discovered Android users had a significantly lower open rate (8%) compared to iOS (16%). We then A/B tested a more concise, action-oriented message specifically for Android users, resulting in a 4% uplift in their open rate for that segment, adding tens of thousands in incremental sales over the campaign period. It’s those small, data-driven tweaks that make a huge difference.
2.3 Analyzing Conversion Funnels within Campaigns
Braze allows you to visualize the user journey post-notification. Within the campaign analytics, navigate to the Funnels tab. Here, you can define a series of steps (e.g., “Push Notification Opened” > “Product Page Viewed” > “Added to Cart” > “Purchased”). Braze will then show you the drop-off rates between each step. This is invaluable for identifying bottlenecks in your user experience. If you see a massive drop-off between “Product Page Viewed” and “Added to Cart,” it might indicate an issue with your product page content or pricing, not necessarily the push notification itself.
Expected Outcome: A clear understanding of how users interact with your push notifications, from initial exposure to final conversion, highlighting areas for improvement in both messaging and in-app experience.
Step 3: Leveraging Audience Analytics for Smarter Segmentation
Generic push notifications are a waste of everyone’s time. The power of push notification analytics truly shines when you start understanding different user segments.
3.1 Exploring Audience Segments and Their Behaviors
Go to Audience > Audience Analytics in Braze. Here, you can create and analyze custom user segments based on various attributes (e.g., “High-Value Purchasers,” “Recent App Installers,” “Users in Atlanta, Georgia”). Once a segment is defined, you can view its engagement metrics across all campaigns. For example, you might discover that your “Loyal Subscribers” segment has a 25% higher push notification open rate than your “Churn Risk” segment. This isn’t just interesting data; it’s a directive to tailor your messaging.
Pro Tip: Don’t just analyze segments; compare them. Use the “Compare Segments” feature within Audience Analytics to directly contrast the push notification engagement of two different user groups. This often reveals surprising insights.
3.2 Identifying Top-Performing Segments for Push Notifications
Within Audience Analytics, you can filter by “Received Push Notifications” and then further refine by specific campaign tags. This allows you to see which segments are most receptive to certain types of messages. For instance, if your “New Feature Launch” campaigns consistently perform well with your “Early Adopter” segment, you know to prioritize this group for future new feature announcements. Conversely, if a segment shows consistently low engagement, it might be time to re-evaluate your strategy for them or even consider excluding them from certain push campaigns to avoid notification fatigue.
Common Mistake: Treating all users the same. Your 18-24 year old user in Buckhead is likely to respond differently to a push notification than your 45-55 year old user in Alpharetta. Segment, segment, segment!
3.3 Creating Dynamic Segments for Personalized Messaging
Based on your analytics, create dynamic segments that automatically update as user behavior changes. For example, a segment called “Users Who Viewed Product X but Didn’t Purchase in Last 24 Hours.” You can then target this segment with a personalized push notification offering a discount or reminding them about their abandoned cart. This level of personalization, driven by real-time data, significantly boosts engagement. You can set this up under Audience > Segments > Create Segment and define your criteria using custom events and user attributes.
Expected Outcome: Highly targeted and personalized push notification campaigns that resonate deeply with individual user preferences, leading to increased open rates and conversions.
Step 4: A/B Testing and Iteration for Continuous Improvement
Analysis without action is just data hoarding. The real value of push notification analytics comes from using those insights to constantly refine and improve your campaigns. This is where A/B testing becomes your best friend.
4.1 Setting Up A/B Tests for Push Notification Content
When creating a new push notification campaign in Braze, select “A/B Test” as your campaign type. You can then create multiple variants of your push notification, testing different headlines, body copy, emojis, or even calls to action. Braze allows you to distribute your audience evenly or allocate different percentages to each variant. For example, you might test “Flash Sale: 50% Off Everything!” against “Don’t Miss Out! Your Favorites Are Now Half Price.”
Pro Tip: Test one variable at a time. If you change the headline, body, and image simultaneously, you won’t know which change caused the performance difference. Focus on isolating variables for clear results.
4.2 Analyzing A/B Test Results and Drawing Conclusions
After your A/B test has run for a sufficient period (typically enough to gather statistical significance, which Braze will often indicate), revisit the campaign’s analytics page. Braze will clearly show you the performance of each variant across key metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. It will also highlight the winning variant. Don’t just pick the winner and move on; try to understand why it won. Was it the urgency? The personalization? The brevity?
Editorial Aside: So many marketers just look at the “winner” and call it a day. That’s a huge missed opportunity! The real gold is understanding the underlying psychological trigger that made one variant outperform the other. That insight can be applied to dozens of future campaigns, not just one.
4.3 Iterating Based on Analytics and A/B Test Learnings
The insights from your A/B tests and ongoing push notification analytics should feed directly into your next campaign. If you learn that emojis significantly boost open rates for a certain segment, incorporate them more strategically. If long-form copy performs poorly, condense your messages. This iterative process, constantly informed by data, is the only way to achieve sustained growth in engagement. I had a client who, after three rounds of A/B testing, increased their average push notification conversion rate by 30% simply by refining their value proposition and experimenting with different urgency tactics.
Expected Outcome: A continuous cycle of improvement, leading to progressively more effective push notification campaigns with higher engagement and conversion rates over time.
Mastering push notification analytics within Braze transforms your marketing efforts from guesswork to precision. By diligently tracking, segmenting, and testing, you can deliver messages that not only reach your audience but genuinely resonate, driving meaningful actions and measurable business outcomes. The future of mobile engagement belongs to those who understand their data.
How do I track revenue generated specifically from push notifications in Braze?
To track revenue, ensure your in-app purchase events (e.g., “Purchase_Completed”) are properly logged with associated revenue values. When setting up your push campaign in Braze, define a conversion goal that corresponds to this purchase event. Braze’s Campaign Analytics dashboard will then display the attributed revenue for that specific campaign.
What is a good open rate for push notifications in 2026?
A “good” open rate varies significantly by industry and audience. However, in 2026, with increasing notification fatigue, anything above 15% is generally considered strong for broad campaigns. Highly targeted, personalized pushes can see open rates exceeding 30-40%. Always benchmark against your own past performance and industry averages from reputable sources like eMarketer or HubSpot Research.
Can I see which specific users opened my push notification?
Braze primarily aggregates data for privacy and scalability reasons, so you typically won’t see a list of individual users who opened a specific push notification directly in the campaign analytics. However, you can create segments of users who performed certain actions (like “Opened Push Notification X”) and then analyze the characteristics of that segment or target them with follow-up campaigns.
How often should I A/B test my push notifications?
You should A/B test continuously. Every significant campaign or message type should ideally have an A/B test component. This doesn’t mean you need to test every single variable every time, but consistently testing one or two elements (headline, CTA, timing) helps you gather ongoing insights and adapt to changing user preferences. I recommend at least one significant A/B test per month for active senders.
What’s the difference between “Opens” and “Clicks” in push notification analytics?
“Opens” typically refers to a user interacting with the notification, often by swiping or tapping it, which then opens the app. “Clicks” usually refers to a user tapping on a specific call-to-action button or deep link within the notification itself, leading them to a particular screen or experience within the app. Both are important, but “clicks” often indicate stronger intent.
