Urban Airship, a leading provider of in-app marketing, has developed a new web-based push notification capability it calls “Web Notify.” It covers both the desktop and mobile web.
While browser-based notifications have existed for a little while, Urban Airship says it’s first-to-market with a platform that enables an integrated (or segmented) PC, mobile web and app marketing capability. The company says browser support includes Chrome, Firefox and Opera — but not Safari for now.
While mobile web users are less loyal and less engaged than app users, the mobile web is much larger and growing faster than apps. Retailers in particular have struggled to gain adoption for their apps. Accordingly, Urban Airship’s new tools enable marketers with limited app penetration to deploy notifications to their mobile web and PC users.
Web notifications can either be identical to in-app notifications or treated differently, depending on the objectives of the marketer. The only difference in functionality, according to Urban Airship’s Director of Product Marketing Bill Schneider, is that location-based notifications aren’t as precise in the web version. That’s because apps can capture device location, whereas browser-based location relies on reverse IP lookups, which are often crude.
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