Notification Service

Overview

Notification Service is a notification management tool where you can set up notifications for your games, and Meta will handle the notification scheduling/sending for you. It can be regarded as a codeless version of A2U Notifications. Key benefits include:

1. Codeless: It frees you from integrating with Graph API so you can focus on the content of your games
2. Smart delivery strategy: It supports various smart strategies to help you engage users effectively
3. User reach: Notifications will be sent to users who are most likely to engage with them, as determined by an automatic targeting system
4. Streamlined development experience: It supports real-time notifications preview and notification sending to your account with one click for testing
5. i18n: It supports i18n configuration for notification content to help your game go international
6. No computing resources needed: Meta will handle the heavy lifting part of scheduling notifications, you don’t need to reserve additional resources to send notifications

Review the Notification Guidelines for all the best practices and requirements for notification content.

Notifications Service Dashboard

To view the Notification Service, navigate to the Notification Service section within the Instant Games product on the developer dashboard. All the work to create/update/test/monitor notifications can be completed on the dashboard. You can create notifications and find all of them in here, along with the following information:

1. Label: Label is the unique identifier of a notification. Hovering over a label will trigger a popover with more information about the notification, including the Notification ID and the content preview
2. Active: Only active notifications will be considered for scheduling. The notification status can be toggled from the three dots actions menu in the last column
3. Sending Status: This column shows the status of the notification, which can be:
   • Sending in Progress: the notification is currently being sent to all eligible users
   • Ready to Send: the notification will be sent at the specified time
   • Completed: the notification has been successfully sent
4. Type: There are two types of notifications:
   • Single-send notifications are only sent once to a user on a specified date
   • Event-based notifications are sent to a user after the specified event trigger occurs
5. Schedule: For Single Send notifications, the column shows the specified date. For Event-based notifications, the column shows the time after a specific event occurs
6. Three dot menu: A menu with more admin options for each notification setting, including:
   • Turn on/off: Toggle between active / inactive states for the notification
   • View/Edit: View or edit the notification
   • Send Preview: Sends a real notification to your Facebook/Messenger account for testing the end-to-end flow. In order to send it to Messenger, please set up Game Updates via Messenger and subscribe to it. You can subscribe by manually entering your game:
     • On mobile, navigate to the in-game menu, and toggle the “Game Updates”, setting to “on”
     • On web, toggle the “Game Updates” setting to “on” on the right panel
   • Delete: Delete the notification setting permanently, this cannot be undone ss

Create Notifications

Create on the UI

From the Notification Service dashboard, select Create in the upper right corner. Please fill in the form with the following information:

1. Label: Unique notification identifier in the form of alphanumeric characters and underscores with a length of 3-30. Though it’s only visible to you, it’s highly recommended to give it a meaningful name to make notification management easier
2. Media URL (Optional): URL to a statically hosted image (JPG/PNG), which will be used for rendering the media attachment on Messenger if your game has set up Game Updates via Messenger. If neither Media URL nor Bot Message Payload Elements are provided, notifications will be always sent to Facebook.
3. Locales for Notification Content Translation: Provide notification content in different languages if you want your notifications to be translated based on users’ preferred language on Facebook. You should at least provide English.
4. Notification Title and Notification Body: Note that these are used differently depending on delivery via Facebook or Messenger.

Platform	Notification Title	Notification Body
Facebook	Not used	Used as the body of Facebook Jewel/Gaming Tab notifications
Messenger	Used as the title of the media attachment	Used as the subtitle of the media attachment

5. Notification Preview: View a real-time rendering of the notifications as you fill in the Notification Body. You can select languages using the dropdown to change between the languages you’ve provided. In order to test on Messenger, please use the Send Preview button after the setting is saved. It’s highly recommended to use the Notification Preview, or the Send Preview functionality to test how the notification looks before turning it on.
6. Bot Message Payload Elements (Optional): A parameter to send advanced Game Updates via Messenger (formerly known as bot messages) on Messenger. If specified, it will override the Notification Title, Notification Body, and Media URL fields when sent to Messenger. Follow this documentation to learn more. Please note: you only need to provide the "elements" value in here as an array. It’s recommended to test it thoroughly before enabling the notifications because when misconfigured, sending notifications to Messenger will fail. Please wrap the keys of the JSON input in double quotes.
7. Payload (Optional): Custom payload in JSON format that will be attached to the game URL and can be read when the user enters your game through the notification. It’s highly recommended to provide this field and handle it accordingly in your games to customize the game landing experience from notifications. Please wrap the keys of the JSON input in double quotes. When creating a notification through the Notification Service, you can specify a custom JSON payload. When users receive the notification and click through, the stringified payload will be attached to the game URL. In Instant Games, you can use the FBInstant.getEntrypointData to get the payload which is parsed into a Javascript object. Then, you can apply handling logic corresponding to the payload.
   Example: if you are running a promotion, you can use something like {“type”: “promotion_through_notification”, “reward”: {“gold”: 300}}. When users click through the notification, you will get an object by calling FBInstant.getEntrypointData(), which is {type: “promotion_through_notification”, reward: {gold: 300}}. Then, you can program your games to offer the promised reward to the users.
8. Notification Type
   • Single Send notifications are sent once per user on the specified day who has played your games within 10 days. Common uses include: updates to your games, share promotions, and bringing awareness to the upcoming/ongoing game events. Please note:

     • The Notification Date will be based on the UTC time
     • Only one Single Send notification can be active per day
   • Event-based notifications are sent based on the user activity with your game. Currently, the supported event is users playing your game. You can configure notifications to be sent within a certain time window after the event to strategize how to re-engage users. For example, send notifications 2 hours later to remind users of coming back and send 3 days later to re-engage users. Note: consecutive event-based notifications must be at least 12 hours apart, e.g. if you enable a notification which will be sent 1 hour after play, the next one you can enable cannot be earlier than 13 hours.
9. Send Time Strategy: Choose the time of the day when you want this notification to be sent. It is applicable to both Single Send notifications, and event-based notifications whose sent time are more than 1 day after the event occurs. There are 3 strategies supported:

Send Time Strategy	Description
Predicted Best Time	The notification will be sent at the time slot recommended by Meta on a per-user level when users are most likely to interact with the notification
Fixed Time (Local/UTC) Strategy	The notification will be sent in the time window you specify. Indicate the time in 24-hour format (HH:00) (24-hour format). This supports: Fixed Local Time: The notification will be sent at a fixed time dependent on users’ time zones. Fixed UTC Time: The notification will be sent at a fixed UTC time.

Create from CSV

Besides Creating notifications manually on the Notification Service UI, creating notifications from CSV is also supported. To access this tool, simply click the Create from CSV button on the Notification Service dashboard. Please note:

• Only the following columns are supported:

  • label
  • notification_title_{language_name}
  • notification_body_{language_name}
  • media_url
  • payload
  • bot_message_payload_elements
• We offer a convenient method for deducing the target date from the label. If the label adheres to the format yyyy-mm-dd, the target date will automatically be assigned accordingly.
• For notification_title and notification_body, please replace the language_name with the specific language, e.g. notification_title_English and notification_body_English. You can add as many notification content columns as you need. Refer to the Locales for Notification Content Translation dropdown menu on Notification Creation page for the list of supported languages
• Please fill out the additional information on the Notification Service UI after creating from CSV file
• An example CSV file can be downloaded from Notification Service, please use it as a reference

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a statistical method used to compare two versions of a product or feature to determine which one performs better. It involves randomly splitting users into two groups: the control group sees the original version (A), while the treatment group sees the modified version (B). By measuring the difference in user behavior between the two groups, you can identify which version is more effective in achieving their goals.

A/B testing is important for several reasons:

• Data-driven decision making: A/B testing provides objective data to guide product decisions, reducing reliance on assumptions and opinions.
• Improved user experience: By identifying the better-performing version, you can ensure that users receive the optimal experience.
• Increased engagement and conversion: A/B testing helps fine-tune features to better meet user needs, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
• Continuous improvement: A/B testing enables a culture of continuous experimentation and iteration, fostering ongoing product optimization.

Notification Service offers a fully managed feature for iterating on your notification content. Please note that currently, only content-based A/B testing is supported. To initiate an A/B test:

To initiate an A/B test:

• Create a notification using the Notification Service tool as usual.
• After saving the notification, click the "View/Edit" button to access the notification details page. Then, navigate to the "A/B Test" tab located at the top of the page.
• Within the A/B Test tab, provide the test group configuration. Once all fields are filled in, click "Save" before starting the A/B test by clicking "Enable Test."
• After enabling the A/B test, the test status should change to "PENDING" immediately. Note that it may take some time to initiate the test. If the status does not switch to "IN_PROGRESS" within one day, please submit a bug report.
• The A/B testing process will run from the designated "Start Date" to the specified "End Date." If one group significantly outperforms the other in terms of CTR (click-through rate), the "Winner" column will display the result. Please note that it can take up to 4 days to calculate the outcome. If the experiment results are not available 4 days after the end date, file a bug report.

Please be aware that there are certain limitations to using this feature:

• Only one active A/B test for Notification Service is supported at any given time.
• Once an A/B test is started, it cannot be disabled; you must wait for it to complete before beginning another test.

Guardrails

We have two automated guardrails to help you utilize notifications most effectively to achieve long-term success: rate limiting and notification scheduling validation.

Rate Limiting

The window to send a notification is 10 days from when a user last played your game. A maximum of up to 5 notifications can be sent to a user during this time. This limit is reset when the user plays the game again. Please note that Notifications Service will share the notification quota with the A2U Notification Graph API, which means with these 2 ways combined together, users can receive up to 5 notifications within 10 days after playing a game.

Notification Scheduling Validation

In order to avoid conflicting notifications from being accidentally enabled, certain guardrails exist to prevent the notification setting from being enabled if they are likely to bring a subpar experience to users. The guardrails are:

• Overall: you can enable at most 10 active notifications, enabling a 11th one will be blocked unless you turn off other active notifications
• Single Send: Only 1 notifications can be scheduled on a specified date
• Event-based: 2 event-based notifications should be at least 12 hours apart