TwinPush User's Manual

TwinPush is Marketing Mobile Platform that allows sending Push notifications to Smartphones. TwinPush offers you a new Direct Communication Channel between your Business and your Users.

If If you have already built your own Mobile App by integrating our Android SDK or our iOS SDK, in your Android or iOS App respectively, you may start in this section. If you haven't yet, we can show you how to do it, in our Developers Section.

Sign up for a new TwinPush account at app.twinpush.com, create a workspace for your App, upload your Google CGCM or your Apple APNS certificate and start sending Push notification. You can come back and check our User Manual anytime whenever you need help.

Troubles? please visit our FAQ Section and find answers or just Contact us, we will be happy to help you with TwinPush.

Register and Login

If you don't have a user's account in Twinpush yet, you can register at app.twinpush.com. Business customers, may have their own subdomain to accesss: yourcompany.twinpush.com, please contact us to get your own subdomain.

From this screen you will be able to:

  1. Register as a new user: Create a new TwinPush account
  2. Create a new TwinPush account: Forgot password?
  3. Start session in TwinPush using your login and password, if you have already registered.

Register

Write your email address and password. Remmeber that when you are register, you are agreeing with the terms and conditions.

Recover your password

Just write the email address you used when registering and in short time you will received an email with instructions to recover your password.

Apps

The first time you access to TwinPush, we will ask you to create your first App, by the moment we will only ask you your App Name and your App Icon, just for your own reference. Later, you may modify these settings. When clicking to Create App you wil be creating the workspace for your App.

  • App name: try to give a name that describes your app. A good name will help to easy identify that app to you and to your team. Example: Customers Premium EU Android Production.
  • Icon: It doesn't have to be the same icon that you use in the Market, it just allows you to quickly identify your app when you have many.

Your First App

Now the workspace of your App is already created in TwinPush, you will land into your App Dashboard. Next, you must integrate the TwinPush SDK into your mobile application and upload your certificate in order to send notifications. Follow the SDK instructions here.

Dashboard

The Dashboard page will bring you a general view of the evolution of your App. In this page you can see graphically how Devices are registering in your App, the Notifications you are sending, the Activity that your Users are developing in your App and how your Users are reacting to your Notifications. You can select a time frame in the upper-right corner.

More Apps

Once you have created your first App, you can add more Apps at any time. If you want to add one more App and you currently are at the Dashboard of any App, click on the icon or name of your App in the upper bar and choose from the dropdown menu Create a new application option. You will get a screen of all your Apps. By clicking down over the New Application icon you will be creating a new App. If you have two of more Apps already, you will get this screen as soon as you start session in TwinPush. When you get to have many Apps in your account you will have a search box so you can quickly access to anyone. Click over any App to get into the Dashboard of that App.

Notifications

Your First Notification

In order to send notifications, first, get access to your App Dashboard and click on the Push icon, on the left sidebar. If this is the first time you send a notification using this App, you will get the following screen. Click on Create the first one:

or you can also click on Create new notification on the upper right corner of the screen, just below your email address.

If you have already sent notifications using this App, the Push icon will take you to the following screen. From here you can see statistics of your sent notifications, your groups of notifications, your last notifications, your campaigns, etc. You can also reuse groups, notifications or campaigns, we will explain you later how to do that. To create a new nottification from this screen, click on Create new notification on the upper right corner of the screen.

Push Composer

By clicking on Create new notification you get into the Push Composer.

The Push Composer will show you a series of tabs: Push, Content, Target, Schedule and Advanced and will take you by default to the Psuh tab. The composer will also show you a phone simulation on the right side of the screen, where you can see how your notification will show to the users when receive it in an Android as well as in an iOS device.

To send a notification, the minimum required fields to complete are: the Alert, under the Push tab, and at least one Target, other options will help you to enhace your notifications, to perform different actions when the user clicks over the notification, to choose your target users or to schedule your notifications so you can automatically send them whenever you want.

Push

Use this tab to write your notification. The notification itself is sent in plain text. When composing the message take into account that smartphones with outdated operative systems are limited to notifications size of around 250 characters, that means that you should fit your plain text message, the rich text or the URL in those 250 characters. You can add rich text or an external URL at the Content tab.

TwinPush also support emoji in the tittle message as well as in the body of the message, you just have to enable your emoji keyboard in your system to start writing and sending them.

If you want your notifications reach most devices correctly, try to create concise messages and use URL shorteners whenever you can.

  • Tittle: It's first line of the notification, it will be shown highlighted in the device.
  • Alert: Write here the body of your message in plain text.
  • Mailbox: Mark this checkbox to make this notification get saved in the user's mailbox, in this way the user can review it whenever he wants.

Content

At the Content tab, you can select which additional actions the notification will carry out when the user opens it up. In this way, you will be able to send to your users a rich text screen or an external URL, besides the notification. This function is very useful in marketing campaigns, where the notification message arouses the user's interest that could evolve into an immediat action.

  • None: By choosing this option, when the user opens this notification, your App will just get opened, in the same way as if he would open it up from your App icon.
  • URL: Write here an URL with a landing page that will get opened in the smartphone when the user opens this notification.
  • HTML: Create here a rich text HTML message, it can contain other external URL or image links, that will get opened to the user when he opens this notification.

Target tab

Use the Target tab to select the users you want them to receive this notification. You can send this notification to all users of your App, to one or more users selected manually, to your segments, or you can also import a file with your own list of users or devices.

  • All: By choosing All, the notification will be sent to all users registered in the platform and active at the time of sending this notitication.
  • User: Here you can manually select one or more users or devices, to do that, you should identify a user by its Alias, or a device by its Device ID. Remember that any user has a unique Alias, but one user can own one or more devices. You can also quickly select a group of Devices By property according to the values they have in a certain property, plus you can add them a filter by segment in order to extract a very personalized audience. Remember that you define yourself the properties or "Custom Properties" in your App and register them in TwinPush, and one property could be any information that you want to capture from your users, for instance: age, gender, proffesion, interest or any other information.

  • Segment: Choose one or more segments here, you should have created them first in the Target section. Just write the name of the segment one by one in the text box.

  • File: Import a CSV (.csv) or a plain text (.txt) file with your own list of users or devices. You can also customize the message to be send to each user or device. Find the rules for formatting the file here.

    • Filter by segment: You can add one or more filters by segment to the file of users or device you import, in this case, the push notification will only send to the users or devices that fit into the segments conditions.

Schedule

In the Schedule tab, you choose when your notification will be sent out. You can send it now or scheduled it at a particular date/time. TwinPush also offers you a powerful tool to program marketing campaigns under the Setup campaign tab. Into a campaign you can send a notification that you can repeat a number of times you previouly set into a period of time. You can set this period of time to start and end at any time/date, or simple during a given number of days, you can even set the range of hours or the days of the week.

  • Now: The notification will send as soon as you click on Send, that you will find after clicking Save & Preview button.
  • Schedule date: The notification will be sent out at scheduled date and time set here.

  • Setup campaign: You will send the same notification, a number of times into a time period. You can set the number of repetitions, and the time period. You may also limit the number of notifications that a device can receive into a period of time.

This configuration can set a period of time between two time/dates when TwinPush will automatically send the notifications, while making sure the devices meet the conditions previously set.

  • Start and End date of the campaign: The start date is the day when the campaign becomes active therefore TwinPush checks periodically (every 30 minutes max.) which devices should be notified. TwinPush will do so until the end date.
  • Start and End time: The business hours of the campaign.
  • Week days: You can choose the days of the week when the campaign is active.
  • Limits: You can set here the notification limits for each device. The total number of notifications, the frequency and the minimum time between two notifications send to a same device.

Advanced

In the Advanced tab, you can tie this notification to a group, you can set the delivery speed and you can also interact with the application installed in the smartphone.

You can tie one or more notifications into a group, so you can create different groups according to your campaigns, seasons, products, targets, or whatever you want.

The delivery speed is very useful when you send massive notifications that contains actions to external links. It's possible that the peak of the generated traffic impacts over the service availability of those external links, damaging the user's experience, as a consequence. TwinPush allow us to distribute the delivery of a massive notification along the time.

Through TwinPush, we can interact with the App installed in the user's smartphone, we could set the Application Badge number, (the badge, is the number shown in the App icon), the ringtone that is played when a notification is received or the tag that identifies the type of notification received in the App, so you can set in your App to take different actions according to the Tag received.

  • Name: Set the name you want, for internal use, so you can easily identify your own campaigns.
  • Group name: Add here this notification into a group or create a new group by typing the group name here.
  • Delivery speed: Choose the speed that a massive notification would be distributed along the time to your users.
  • Badge: Write here the badge that will get showed into the Smartphone, by default +1 will add one to the current number.
  • Sound: Choose the ringtone that will get played when this notification is received, use only in case your App was already set with a few ringtones.
  • Tags: Let your App in the Smartphone know the type of notification you are sending, use only in case your App was already prepared to receive different types.
  • Custom Properties: They are properties added to notifications that allows you to send information (key/value) to the App that can be interpretated to perform different task, such as to address to the user to a particular section in the App or to show special content or specific functionalities.

  • Advanced iOS settings: From iOS 10 is possible to send file attachments together with the notification itself in order to show to the user images, video, sound... That will get shown without opening the App.

Save & Preview

Once you have completed your notification, you can save it and then send it, by clicking on Save & Preview at the bottom right of the page. TwinPush will save your notification with all your settings and will show you a summary page in your screen. Check your notification and settings and if everything is fine, send it with the Send button. If not, you can edit and correct it with the Edit button, or you can also Delete it. The Duplicate button is very useful to reuse notifications, you can create your own templates and make variations over an existing template.

Warning: only when you have selected "All" in your target audience, before you send the Notification TwinPush will ask for your confirmation, once you confirm the notification will be send:

Details of a Delivered Campaign

When clicking over one of your campaigns you can see all the information related to the delivery.

Campaign statistics

  • Reached Devices: The number of target devices of the campaign.
  • Total of Push sent: The number of devices to which the notification has been sent.
  • Opening Ration: ratio (%) of devices that have opened the notification from the phone main screen of from the notification center.
  • Retention Impact: ration (%) of improvement over the App retention (users that have accessed to the App in that moment) compared to the mean of user access in the last 30 previous days.
  • Download a CSV file with the campaign results: Generation and downloading a CSV file containing the results of the delivery, impacted users, data and received openings.

Target

TwinPush includes a powerful tool to segment all users of your App. With this tool you will be able to create users' segments according to their location, according to the specifications of their device like brand, model or system version, according to their usage profile or even according to the user's information like his language or any other information that your App had captured from the user and had registered in the platform through the "Custom Properties", for example like his age, gender, occupation, interests or any other information.

Your First Target

In order to create targets, first, get access to your the Dashboard of your App and click on Target icon, on the left sidebar. If this is the first time you will create a target using this App, you will get the following screen. Click on Create target on center of the page:

or you can also click on Create new target on the upper right corner of the screen, just below your email address.

If you have already created segments in your app, you will get the following screen. From here you will get a quick view of all your segments. For each segment is shown: the number of devices, the rate of target devices (green bar) over your total number of devices (grey background bar) and the type of filter applied to the segment: by location, by device properties or by usage statistics. To create a new segments from this screen, just click on Create new target on the upper right corner.

Segments Editor

By clicking over Create a new target, you get into the Segments Editor. The Editor will take you to the Location filter by default. The Segments Editor is presented as a series of filters on the left margin of the page, you will progressively adding filters to your new segment. There are three type of filters: by Location, by User info or by Device info. In the middle of the page you will find configuration options for the selected filter. On the right side of the page you can add a condition to all selected filters and give a name to your brand new segment.

Each filter will show a small superscript to its relevant section when added. This superscript shows the total number of filters in that section. In this way, if you add 2 different languages, the superscript will show 2 in the language section, and if you add 3 different cities the superscript will show 3 in that section.

Filters by Location

TwinPush offers different ways to filter a group of users according to their location: you can create one or more geofences, you can specify one or more countries, states, regions or cities, to do that click on Coordinates, Country, State, Region or City respectively.

Creating Geofences

A geofence is a circular area determined by a geographic coordinate that identify the center of the circle and a radius given in meters. To create a new geofence, click on Coordinates on the left to select that type of filter, then click on Add, on the upper right side of the map. You will get a window like the following screenshot. In this screen you should locate the map marker or POI to your desired position and select a radius by using the sliding bar in lower side. The selected area will show shaded in the map. On the upper side there is search box, you can write there the name of the city you want, you can also navigate the map with your mouse. Once your area of interest has been set, click on Add at the bottom right.

Filters by User info

In this section you will be able to segment your users according to the information that your app had gathered from the user. For that, your app should have register all this information in the TwinPush platform through the "Custom Properties", take a look how to do that here. By default TwinPush offers you language information of your users.

CBy setting up the "Custom Properties" you will be able to segment your users by: age, gender, occupation, interests or any other information that you want to add. To add a filter click on Other properties and then Add in the upper right, it will pop up a window like the following screenshot. In that, you can add a filter on any property that you will find in the dropdown menu.

Filters by Device Info

TwinPush provides you all the information gathered from the device from which your user access to your app. Information like: Platform (iOS or Android), Manufacturer, Model, System version, your App version, etc. You can segment your users by filtering them using that information.

Usage statistics

TwinPush also allows you to segment your users according to the time they spend using your App. With this functionality you will be able to create campaigns to encourage the use of your App, you can reward your users with exclusive offers for that segment. To add a filter, click on Usage statistics and then Add in the upper right, it will pop up a window like the following screenshot. You can add filters on the total usage time, the inactivity period, the daily average usage time or the time lapsed from your app installation.

Segments to users with NOT matching values

TwinPush offers the posibility to create conditions to send notifications to users that Not comply certain conditions. To set it, you just have to select the property and asign it a negative value.

Summary

Once you have set up all your filters, you can add a final condition to all of them in the Summary section, at the right side of the screen. Remember that each filter set will be reflected into the superscript number next to its section. Select "Any" or "All" from the dropdaown menu.

  • any: your target will include all users that meet the conditions of any of the filters, for example: if you have created 2 filters by location, one in Madrid and another in Barcelona, by choosing any, your target will include all devices located in Madrid or in Barcelona, so both locations. The choice any gives you an wider target.
  • all: your target will include all users that meet the conditions of all filters at the same time, for example: if you have created one filter by location in Madrid and another filter by platform iOS, by selecting all, your target will include all iOS users located in Madrid. The choice all gives you a narrower target.

Finally, you can give a name to your target and save it by clicking on Create Target.

Devices

In the Device screen, TwinPush allows you to see our entire database of Users.

The view shows the devices with the most recent registered activity, as well as a search box, where you can search for a specific user by its Alias. The main table shows most relevant information of devices:

  • Push: This field shows a tick when the user has approved receive Push notifications from your App.
  • Active: This field shows a tick when a user is active (He has registered activity in your App at least one time in the last 6 months).
  • Alias: It shows the alias name linked to the device.
  • Platform: It shows an icon of the Operative System iOS or Android, as well as its version.
  • Device ID: This is a TwinPush identifier of the device.
  • Registration date: The date when the device registered to the platform for the first time.
  • Last opened: The date when your App was open the last time.

By clicking on any device from the table, a popup window will open showing all the information related to that device. Besides the general information you will also see:

Device info:

  • Manufacturer
  • Model
  • Device ID
  • Operative System and version
  • App version
  • SDK version

A button will allow you to see all notifications sent and received by that Device.

Received Notifications

When clicking on the See device notifications button, a new screen will load again the device info and also all notifications sent to that device. For each notification, you will see the following information:

  • Type: Simple or Rich
  • Name / Message: notification title
  • Created: creation date and time
  • Push sent: delivery date and time
  • Received at: reception confirmation date and time
  • Opened: date and time on which the user opened it
  • Inbox: whether or not was saved in the user's inbox

Location info:

This functionality will work whenever you have integrate your App with TwinPush SDK to get the geolocation active in the device. TwinPush will show you location information of the device.

  • Country
  • State
  • City

User Data (Custom Properties):

The TwinPush SDK allows you to register properties from the user in the Platform that will also be shown in the Devices screen.

Export data:

TwinPush allows you to Download all your user database at once thought a CVS file. This file will contain all information of each device.

According to the number of users registered in TwinPush this task could be heavy, so TwinPush gives you the posibility to download the latest autogenerated file or you can launch a new process to update this file.

Settings

In the Settings screen you have access to the configuration parameter of your Application, the authentication keys used for the integration and to mage your own team.

Application Details:

You can modify here basic information of your App, such as:

  • Name: The name your App will show in TwinPush.
  • Time Zone: You can set here the default time zone of your App, this parameter will affect the way that all time events are displayed to you, like notifications, scheduling and campaigns, but it will not take effect your notifications already scheduled. Please take note that on each campaigns you can also set a different time zone, unique for that campaign.
  • Icon: Upload here an image that will identify your App in TwinPush.
  • Badge number: This parameter sets the number displayed over the the icon of your App in iOS devices. This value is +1 by default.
  • Max deliveries per minute: You can set here the maximum deliveries per minute of your Notifications. This parameter will affect the Delivery speed dropdown menu at the Advanced settings view when setting a Push notification:
    • Instant: no restrictions will apply to the delivery speed.
    • Fast: the delivery speed will be limited to 100.000 per minute.
    • Normal: the delivery speed will be limited to 10.000 per minute.
    • Slow: the delivery speed will be limited to 1.000 per minute.
  • Allow broadcast notifications: Broadcast notifications allows you a mass notification sending to all the devices of your App with a single Notification. This parameter enables you to restrict this function according to your needs:
    • From API requests and web console: you can create and send broadcast notifications both from the API and the web console.
    • Only from API requests: creating and sending broadcast notifications is allowed only through the API and it will not be possible from the web console.
    • Only from web console: creating and sending broadcast notifications is permitted only through the web console and it will not be possible via the API.
    • Do not allow: creating and sending notifications of this type is not allowed.
  • Default values:
    • Include new notifications in user inbox by default: this checkbox enable the use of the inbox by default, storing all new notifications into each user inbox.
    • Notifications with "mutable-content" enabled by default: by checking this box, the use of mutable content in notifications to iOS devices will be enabled, provided that an appropriate integration with TwinPush has been developed.

Authentication Keys:

In this section you can set and check your authentication keys with the server, these keys are needed by the integration of your App with TwinPush SDK.

  • Sub-domain: Here it's shown the subdomain we have to set in the integration with the SDK, it can be customized to Enterprise customers.
  • Application ID: TwinPush identifier of you App.
  • API Key: Authentication parameter for your App while connecting to TwinPush server.
  • API Key Creator: Authentication parameter needed to create and send notifications from another server.

Team Management:

TwinPush allows you to manage your own team to access to TwinPush platform. To invite a new member, just click on Add new member and write his or her email address, TwinPush will send him or her an invitation email with instructions on how to get access to the platform.

User roles

There are three user roles that the account owner or account administrators can set to each member of your team: Guest, User or Administrator.

Guest: Guest users have access to:

  • the Dashboard.
  • List of registered devices.
  • List of Push notifications.

Writer: Writer users, besides, have access to:

  • Target managements, can create and edit existing segments.
  • Editing notifications, can create or edit notifications and create or edit campaigns, even though, they cannot send push notifications nor activate campaigns.

User: Users with the user role, have also can:

  • Send Push notifications, can notifications and activate campaigns.

Administrator: Administrators have total control of the App and they can also access to:

  • View protected content.
  • Application settings, including viewing API Keys and configure FCM, HMS or APNS.
  • Authentication keys, to authenticate the mobile App (SDK) and TwinPush API.
  • Team Management, they can add new users, edit user roles of existing users andrevoke access to other users.

FCM, HMS and APNS Settings:

In the Settings screen, TwinPush provides you access to configure the certificates to grant you access to the Apple APNS, Google FCM and Huawei Mobile Services HMS, services needed to send Push notifications to devices. These data should be provided by your App developer team, you can get more information about this configuration in the SDK integration manual.

The access to the Google Firebase Cloud Messaging Services (FCM) is granted by the Firebase API Key that can be found in the Firebase Console. To set your App in TwinPush you just have to paste the API Key and the Package name in the apropriate textboxes and click on the Update App button.

In order to send Push notifications using the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) you will need to get at the Huawei AppGallery Connect Console, your Huawei client ID and the secret Oauth 2.0 client credential of your project and paste them in the text boxes shown below and then push the Update App button.

Apple messaging services is accessed with tieh APNS certificate, that expires after a year and must be renew, or by token that it does not expire.

TwinPush keeps track on the expiration date of your APNS certificate and will show you an alert when the time left to expire gets short avoiding you to get errors of not valid certificate when sending notifications to iOS devices.

Uploading a APNS Certificate: While uploading the APNS certificate (.p12 file) you should consider to set it as "Development" if you are compling and testing App versions in our platform, or "Production" if your App is already tested and ready for the Store.

Token: Similarly to the APNS, while uploading the token (.p8 file) you should consider if it goes to your Development or to your Production environment.