Auto-Segment By Notification Topic

Mobile and Web Push setup to track and segment subscribers by clicked notification data.

If you are a publisher that provides articles on different topics or an ecommerce site tracking product interest, there are 3 common things you will want to know about your notifications:

what notification topics your users click
how many times they are clicking that topic
the last time they clicked a notification

With OneSignal, you can track this behavior using Data Tags, adding some code to your site or app (provided below) and sending notifications with a topic.

Doing so, you can segment and reengage your users with content you already know they want.

Here is how it works:

1. Add the Code

If you have a website, you can use the addListenerForNotificationOpened event. Or if you have a mobile app, see the SDK Reference Docs for your SDK and find the Notification Opened or Action Handler.

Within these events, you will use the sendTag and getTags methods to add the received notification details to your user records.

Here is some easy example code to get you started:

OneSignal.push(["addListenerForNotificationOpened", function(payload) {
  // Track last notification click time (paid feature only)
  let timestamp = Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000);
  OneSignal.sendTag("ln_click", timestamp);

  console.log("Received Payload Data: ", payload.data);
  let topic = payload.data.topic; // set topic in notification
  if (topic) {
    OneSignal.getTags().then(function(tags) {
      var topicCount = parseInt(tags[topic], 10);
      console.log("topicCount: ", topicCount);
      if (!isNaN(topicCount)) {
        topicCount += 1;
      } else {
        topicCount = 1;
      }
      OneSignal.sendTag(topic, topicCount).then(function(tagsSent) {
        console.log("tagsSent: ", JSON.stringify(tagsSent));
      });
    });
  }
}]);

class ExampleNotificationOpenedHandler implements OneSignal.NotificationOpenedHandler {
  // This fires when a notification is opened by tapping on it.
  @Override
  public void notificationOpened(OSNotificationOpenResult result) {
    JSONObject data = result.notification.payload.additionalData;
    String topic;

    if (data != null) {
      topic = data.optString("topic", null);
      if (topic != null)
        OneSignal.sendTag("topic", topic);
    }
  }
}

let notificationOpenedBlock: OSHandleNotificationActionBlock = { result in
  let payload: OSNotificationPayload? = result?.notification.payload
  
	if let topic = payload.additionalData?["topic"] {
		OneSignal.sendTag("topic", value: topic)
	}
}

^(OSNotificationOpenedResult *result) {
   
  OSNotificationPayload* payload = result.notification.payload;
        
   if (payload.additionalData["topic"]) {
      [OneSignal sendTag:@"topic" value:payload.additionalData["topic"]];
   }
}

Paid Plan Benefits

Tracking notification clicked time is a paid plan feature only.

2. Send The Notifications With Data

This is very easy, you simply add some Additional Data to the notification using our Dashboard or API data parameter.

This will be the topic of the notification and what you use to segment users. Common topics would be "news", "entertainment", "politics", "finance", "tech", etc.

3. Repeat and Segment

Now, whenever users click the notification, they will get automatically tagged with:

the date they clicked the notification using Time Operators
the notification's topic and how many total times that topic has been clicked

You can now segment subscribers based on the "topic" key, how many times that topic has been clicked and the last time any notification has been clicked.

For example, if you want to target users that click the "news" topic x amount of times. You can use the "is", "greater than" or "less than" operators with the "User Tag" filter.

Also, if you are on a Paid Plan, you can use the "time elapsed greater than" and "time elapsed less than" to track how long it has been since a device last clicked a notification and target them for reengagement.