GB News is one of the UK’s newest TV channels, debuting in 2020. To compete with established news channels like Sky News, GB News sought a single supplier that could cater for web and app pushes and deliver them reliably in the quickest time possible. They chose Pushwoosh as a reliable software partner to quickly broadcast breaking news and send various types of articles across different platforms.
We spoke with GB News’ Senior Analytics Manager Paul Mabb to get an overview of the 18-month partnership with Pushwoosh.
Challenge 1: Streamlining breaking news and editorials
The team’s main goals are to encourage the audience to read the content and raise awareness about membership and its benefits. By using Pushwoosh, they wanted to create a bespoke single push UI that could trigger push events over an API, so the editors wouldn’t have to leave their publishing platform (CMS). Pushwoosh API works just like this.
Pushwoosh enables the GB News team to connect linear TV with online discussions via timely push notifications. For example, during a leadership debate, the team wants to spark discussion in the comments. This can be done with push notifications while the program is still on so that the readers interact with both TV and the mobile app at the same time.
Results
- 12M push notifications per day
- Audience growth to 1.2M push subscribers
- 0.75% avg CTR
Challenge 2: Finding actionable insights to increase loyalty and retention
The next goals of the analytics team are to tailor experiences and better understand when to talk to the audience. The team uses Piano Analytics, their primary analytics platform, to collect data from linear TV, radio, website, and mobile app.
As Paul mentions, “Pushwoosh definitely is able to play a big part in achieving the goal.”
The team gains actionable insights into user behavior by aggregating data from Pushwoosh and Piano, which was set up with the help of GB News’s personal account manager in Pushwoosh.
For example, there’s a football match on tonight. When is the best time to speak with people, and when are they more likely to become members? By running push notification A/B/n tests, the team can test different schedules for push notifications:
A: While the match is on
B: An hour before
C: Half an hour before
The team then analyses the delta between the number of push notifications and the uptake of click-throughs and opening those notifications.
Results
- D30 retention in the GB News app stands at 8.55%, nearly reaching the benchmark of 9.1% for the Media category, as reported by Statista.
