Intro to Data

Airship provides access to engagement data via:

• Dashboard Reports: Out of the box reports for each messaging and mobile wallet project.

• Real-Time Data Streaming: An uninterrupted, customizable event stream from an app or website.

• Performance Analytics: Customizable dashboard-style reports using advanced analytics to show and interpret engagement with your app, website, and across multiple apps.

Use the event stream and analytics to extrapolate information about your audience and how they use your messages and passes, helping you understand how to engage with your customers and users in more meaningful ways.

Engagement Data

Airship retrieves much of its data from user interaction with the SDK, which is required for mobile and web channels.

Data Collection

The engagement data that Airship provides is specific to apps and websites that have installed our SDK, and falls into three main categories of event types:

• User-initiated action, e.g., opening/closing your app, tapping a push notification.

• Device responding to an environment change, e.g., encountering a beacon.

• Experience-changing actions initiated by app publisher, e.g., push send.

We also gather information from SMS, email, and open channels, however, because these channels do not use the SDK, they cannot return some of the advanced usage information that you can get from your apps and websites.

Named Users and Advanced Data

Much of Airship’s advanced data, including orchestration and predictive features, are predicated on your use of Named UsersA customer-provided identifier used for mapping multiple devices and channels to a specific individual.. Because each channel ID represents one of many ways that the same user might access your app or service, Airship uses named users to triangulate behaviors for groups of channels representing individuals in your audience. Determining behavior by named user rather than by channel ID produces higher-resolution data, down to the individual user rather than per device.

We expose the named users and associated analytics data via Performance Analytics and Real-Time Data Streaming, helping you determine how to maximize the impact of your notifications for your real users, not just on an abstracted group of channels.

While Performance Analytics and the event stream do show channel data and return events for individual channels, we recommend implementing the Named User feature to get the most from your data analysis.

Dashboard Reports

Projects have a variety of engagement reports, available from a messaging project’s Reports menu, as well as individual message reports. A/B Tests have a higher-level statistical report along with a message report for each variant. View reports:

• Engagement Reports
• A/B Test Reports
• Sequence Performance
• Message Reports
• Scene Reports

Your passes have Template Reports.

Real-Time Data Streaming

Airship’s Real-Time Data Streaming service delivers engagement events in real time via the Data Streaming API or one of our integrations.

Whereas Performance Analytics collects data, applies Airship’s analysis, and provides a visual interface, our Data Streaming API provides direct, uninterrupted access to your app’s event stream. A call to the API opens an event stream, and will return events until you close your connection to the API, so you can see how users interact with your app in real time.

The SDK looks for engagement events and sends them to the event stream as soon as they are observed, along with the relevant identifiers that associate the events with a particular app user and notification or group of notifications.

Each line in the event stream represents an event from your app or website. If you want to see a subset of events or you want to monitor certain types of events, you can apply filter parameters when opening an event stream, determining the type and quantity of events to return.

See: Getting Started with Real-Time Data Streaming.

Compliance Events For Email and SMS

Compliance events represent operations where users opt into or out of email and SMS notifications; they are effectively records of your users` consent to receive SMS or email notifications. You can open an event stream containing these events, so that you can maintain compliance records, prove compliance with data regulations, and ensure that you respect your audience’s right to privacy.

Compliance events are available to all email- and SMS-using customers through the https://connect.urbanairship.com/api/events/general API endpoint. A POST call to the endpoint opens a stream of uninterrupted newline JSON. Each line in the stream represents an individual compliance event for a single email address or msisdn. This endpoint only returns events with the COMPLIANCE type for email and SMS channels.

See the Compliance Event Endpoint for more information about the endpoint and the JSON events it returns.

Performance Analytics

Airship Performance Analytics is a customizable marketing intelligence tool that provides access to reports and graphs based on engagement data.

While the standard messaging reports convey long-term trends within your app, Performance Analytics provides more immediate data (in windows of up to 13 months) with finer granularity and options to customize the data you want to see. Unlike standard message reports, you can determine what data is relevant to your needs, by audience, event, and other dimensions. You can save your reporting criteria and dashboards, so you always see the data relevant to you and can easily share your insights with others.

You can also convert Performance Analytics reports to downloadable CSV files, making them easier to share and actionable. For example, you might download a report of users who executed a specific custom event, and then upload the CSV as a static list and send notifications to those specific users.

See Getting Started with Performance Analytics.