Overview

The Notification Grouping feature enables marketers to categorize push notifications by defining a group key, ensuring related messages appear together in the notification drawer. Notification grouping is supported in Android and iOS push notifications. Grouping related notifications reduces clutter, improves user experience, and increases engagement with marketing content.

Use Cases

The following are some use cases for this feature:

• News apps: Stack updates by category, such as sports, politics, and entertainment.
• Banking apps: Group transaction-related notifications for better tracking.
• E-commerce apps: Organize order updates, promotions, and recommendations.

How Notifications Grouping Works

Perform the following steps to group your push notifications:

1. In the second step of push campaign creation, Content, expand the Advanced tab.
2. In the Group key box, enter the group ID.
   • This group ID  identifies and categorizes related push notifications. Ensure you use the same group key for all push notifications you want to group.
   • MoEngage automatically modifies the group key to ensure it does not exceed the 45-character limit. MoEngage removes non-Latin scripts, special characters, and spaces to restrict the key composition to ASCII characters exclusively.
3. Complete the remaining steps of the push campaign creation process and send your campaign.

Example

We will create a Push campaign for a new app called MoEngage Today. This app wants to send push notifications for the latest news in three categories: Sports, Politics, and Entertainment. It wants these notifications to stack within the user's notification drawer based on their respective categories.

Let's assume the MoEngage Today app team is creating three separate Push campaigns, one for each category.

• Sports news campaign:
  • Content creation: Draft the notification messages, for example:
    • Breaking! FC Barcelona wins the El Clasico in dramatic fashion!
    • Lakers defeat Warriors in Western Conference showdown.
  • Group Key: In the Group key box, enter newssports.
• Politics news campaign:
  • Content creation: Draft the notification messages, for example:
    • The government unveils new policy changes impacting citizens nationwide.
    • Developments in recent political events.
  • Group Key: In the Group key box, enter newspolitics.
• Entertainment news campaign:
  • Content creation: Draft the notification messages, for example:
    • Billie Eilish drops a surprise album overnight.
    • Avengers: Endgame becomes the highest-grossing movie of all time!
  • Group Key: In the Group key box, enter newsentertainment.

Outcomes

When these push notifications are delivered on a user's device:

• All sports news notifications with the newssports group key will be stacked under a single expandable group, showing a summary like 2 new messages.
• Similarly, all political news notifications with the newspolitics group key will be stacked under another group.
• All entertainment news notifications with the newsentertainment group key will be stacked under another group.

On Device Behavior

In Android

• Android allows grouping multiple notifications starting from Android 7.0 (API level 24) to keep the notification drawer organized. For more info, see the Android Notification Guide.
• Notifications with the same group key are stacked in the notification drawer. The notification drawer shows a summary notification combining the latest two messages:
  • Line 1: Title 1 – Message 1
  • Line 2: Title 2 – Message 2
• The summary of the notification group in the collapsed state will be the same as that of the latest notification.
• Clicking the group opens the latest notification. Expanding the group displays individual notifications.
• When a user clicks a grouped notification, the click is attributed to the most recent notification.
• For the Notification Received event, the value of the group key appears as an event attribute named Group Key.

Limitations

• For push templates, the backup notification appears in the collapsed group view, not the full template content.
• It may take some time to group notifications. The first notification in a group may initially appear as a separate notification and is merged into the group after a delay. This behavior is most commonly observed when the notification drawer is open. The SDK does not have control over this grouping delay.

In iOS

• Apple started supporting notification grouping in iOS 12, allowing related notifications to be stacked together for a streamlined experience. For more info, see Apple Developer Documentation.
• APNS thread ID manages the stacking of notifications with the same group key in the notification drawer.
• The grouping behavior is subject to device settings:
  • If the user changes the notification grouping from Automatic, the feature does not work. For more information, refer here. The type of grouping for notifications:
    • 0: Automatic: Groups notifications into app-specified groups.
    • 1: By app: Groups notifications into one group.
    • 2: Off: Does not group notifications.
• For the Notification Received event, the value of the group key appears as an event attribute named Group Key.

Limitations

• Notifications are not grouped in the Push Notification Center or Self-handled Notification Center.
• Only devices running SDK versions supporting notification grouping will display grouped notifications. Older SDKs will ignore the feature.

FAQs

Best Practices

• Use clear group key definitions. Ensure that notifications in the same campaign share a logical grouping.
• Test grouping behavior on multiple devices. Verify that notifications stack correctly on Android and iOS.
• Create a custom dashboard to identify the common groups used in Android and iOS.