Airship (formerly Urban Airship) is one of our productised third party SDKs for use in Pugpig Bolt. Its feature set includes push and in-app messaging, with substantial control over who receives what messages and when.

Set up

Support can configure this for you in distribution if we have been granted access via either of our analytics@kaldorgroup.com accounts (we have both EU and US ones). 

See Airship's messaging project creation guide and their configuration guide if you haven't already got your app set up there. Note that projects can be set up as either ‘Live’ or ‘Test’, so you may have a separate project for test environments. 

Audience management

Airship offers different ways to manage your audience, as detailed in their Audience Management overview.

Audience segmentation can be done based on analytics events, see our segmentation doc and Airship's Segments guide. Segments can be set to target specific events or dimensions as presented in our analytics spec, but each event and parameter/dimension/property must be set up in Airship's Events menu. For more information on this see Airship's documentation on Managing Events (note that you must set the event to ‘Activate for Segmentation’ to make it available for segmentation). Events can be configured with multiple properties (matching our dimensions), these are added per-event, like so:

It's also possible to manage the audience via tag groups (matching what is sent via the user's verify auth call, following our DUTA model this must use the /custom_tags/ format). See Airship's guide to tags for more information (note that tag groups must be set up in the Airship UI, as detailed in their guide). For Piano auth users we recommend adding tag groups for both GrantedResourceId and GrantedResourceName.

We also support Airship named users. Please note, as detailed in their doc, that this setting must be enabled in their UI for this to work. Again, this would match what is sent via the user's verify auth call (following our DUTA model, this must be in the /user/ format).

For information on using Airship's Contact Management feature (useful for testing named users or tag groups, for example), see their Contact management doc.

Segmentation can also be done by Attributes (following our DUTA model, this must use the /user/ format). See Airship's Managing Attributes documentation for more information (note that Attributes must be added in their UI).

Message center

We support Airship's message center functionality. A deep link to the message center can be added to the Settings tab, for example.

Preference center

We support this feature. See Airship's docs on the topic and our doc about the preference center for more information.

Analytics

To track the performance of your notifications you can use the BoltNotificationOpen event in your analytics provider. By populating the PPCampaign value you can attribute opens to a specific push campaign (using the KGLabel or pugpigCampaign dimension).

To assign a PPCampaign value you need to ensure ‘Custom Keys’ are enabled in your dashboard settings. Head to Settings > Dashboard Settings > Toggle on Custom Keys.

After you have configured your campaign content you can define the PPCampaign value in the ‘Delivery’ stage of your campaign. This should be a string and will usually match the deeplink URL enabling you to identify the specific push.

After sending the campaign, the PPCampaign value will populate the KGLabel/pugpigCampaign dimension of your BoltNotificationOpen events, allowing you to track the performance of specific campaigns.