Adding notification permission data to the Chrome User Experience Report

Chrome 80 introduced quieter permission UI for notifications. To help site owners understand notification permission metrics, we’re adding this data to the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) in the 202001 dataset, released on February 11,

2020. This will allow site owners gain a better understanding of typical user notification permission responses for their sites and comparable sites in their category.

CrUX only provides a high level summary of notification permission request Accept, Block, Ignore, and Dismiss rates. We recommend you augment this data with detailed analytics from your preferred analytics platform.

About CrUX notification permission data

The CrUX data format and methodology is described in detail in the developer documentation, and you should review considerations on population and analysis best practices. Because reported data is only from opt-in users, there may be variance between data in the CrUX dataset and data you collect from your own analytics.

When a notification permission is requested, Chrome will show users a prompt. Users can actively or passively take one of four actions, described in the table below.

The CrUX dataset includes data for each of these user actions as a percentage of responses.

How to interpret your data

Block and Accept rates are the two most important metrics. As described in the quieter notification permissions blog post, Chrome will automatically enroll sites with very low Accept rates into the quieter permissions UI. Block rate is also a strong signal. When a user clicks Block, the user has sent a clear message that they are not interested in receiving the site’s notification, not just at that moment, but at any time. Most often this means that the user does not understand the intended use of the notification, the value of the product and service, or has not established trust with your website. Both low Accept or high Block rates are a clear indicator that the website should review the recommended patterns section in this article.

It is normal and expected that different types of sites will have different Accept and Block rates. For example, a chat app or email app has a very strong use case and we could expect Accept rates to be quite high. It’s also normal that rates for the same app may vary significantly between desktop and mobile, as the use cases can be different and users may have a strong preference for notification on one type of device over the other.

As more users enroll in quieter notifications UI we expect that Ignore rates will increase relative to other metrics. You should view this trend as normal and expected.

Recommended patterns

Let your users take the initiative. Integrate toggles or buttons into your website’s user interface and allow users to turn on notifications at their own pace. Only actively prompt for notifications when the benefit is obvious from the context. For example, on an ecommerce site an order delivery notification is an obvious value add to the user and sites asking for permission for this purpose have very high Accept rates.

Avoid requesting the notification permission immediately after a user lands on the site. The user’s browsing experience is interrupted without context as to why notifications are needed or useful to them.

Querying the dataset

Beginning with the 202001 CrUX dataset, you can access notification permission data by querying the experimental.permission.notifications field.

SELECT
  SUM(experimental.permission.notifications.accept) AS accept,
  SUM(experimental.permission.notifications.deny) AS deny,
  SUM(experimental.permission.notifications.ignore) AS `ignore`,
  SUM(experimental.permission.notifications.dismiss) AS dismiss
FROM
  `chrome-ux-report.all.202001`
WHERE
  origin = 'https://news.google.com'

Note: Because "ignore" is a reserved keyword in BigQuery, we have to enclose it in backticks so it's interpreted as a field name.

In this example, we're querying the notification permission data for Google News. We use the SUM function to add up the permission rates for each dimension (form factor and effective connection type) so we get an origin-wide view.

The results show that 82.3% of users accept the notification permission prompt, while 4.8% deny, 5.0% ignore, and 7.9% dismiss it.

Learn more about using CrUX on BigQuery and browse the CrUX Cookbook for more example queries.

Feedback

For any questions, or to share your thoughts/feedback about the notification permission data in CrUX, you can reach us on the CrUX support forum or @ChromeUXReport on Twitter.