Clickthrough rate for notifications are down by 10%. Why?

I am assuming this is for one of the Meta products – FB, Instagram.

Is this clickthrough rate metric for per user or overall? à Overall

What does clickthrough rate for notifications exactly mean? à The users of the application receive notifications when the app is in open or close state. Clickthrough rate = No. of notifications which have been clicked by the user/Total number of notifications sent.

Is this decrease for notifications which are sent when the app is open or close state? à Mostly closed state

Is this decrease seasonal? à No

Is this a sudden drop or has been happening over quite some time? à Gradual

Is this drop week over week or month over month? à Month-on-month

We know that the mission of Meta is to give people the power to build communites and bring the world closer together. Sending out notifications to keep users up to date and not lose out on the activities that happened when he/she was not available is one of the ways of bringing people closer. The main goal of notifications is to increase engagement. 

Keeping the above in mind, I am going to try to evaluate the issue from different perspectives - metric measurement, technical, user action and market/competition. Eventually, I will also try to produce a few solutions.

Analysis for metric measurement perspective:

• Has there been any change in the metric calculation?
• Has there been any change in the tool used for metric capturing & calculation?
• Is there a proportionate change in the monthly active users as well?
• Is there a proportionate change in the number of app sessions in a month?
• Is there a change in the total number of notifications sent in a month?

Analysis from technical perspective:

• Is the drop in clickthrough rate for notifications specific to any OS (iOS vs Android)?
• Is the drop specific to any software version of the social media application?
• During the time window the clickthrough rate was dropping, were there any major backend feature or UI feature upgrades done, especially with respect to how/when notifications are sent or how notifications appear on mobile or in the process of clicking a notification and opening of the app or the triggers for sending a notification or the content in certain notifications?
• Are there any bug reports of unable to click on notifications or the social media app not opening when clicked on a notification?
• Are there any other bug reports?

Analysis from user activity perspective:

• Is the drop in clickthrough rate for notifications specific to any geography?
• Is the drop in clickthrough rates specific to any user segment?
• Is the drop specific to any time-window such as nighttime or office hours?
• Is the drop specific to power users or active users or inactive users?
• Are there any bug reports or negative reviews or social media chatter on people finding it difficult to click on notifications or the social media app not opening when clicked on a notification or unhappy with the notifications or issue with any other feature?

Analysis from market/competition perspective:

For this metric, there will be no need to analyze from market/competition perspective because if there is any effect from market/competition, it will be more visible on the other important health metrics such as number of active users, engagement levels, satisfaction levels etc.

Solutions:

1. If the drop is due to any technical issue (feature release/bug) à Analyze further and find the root cause and get the issue fixed as soon as possible or rollback the affected release version.
2. If the drop is due to changes in user behavior (not find the notifications useful) à Devise short-term and long-term strategies to bring about product improvements to increase user engagement levels for notifications such as make the notification content more fun and interesting, make the UI livelier etc.
3. If there are negative reviews around notifications à Analyze the notification content, the triggers and find an optimum number of notifications to be sent per day and appropriate scenarios to trigger a notification.