Campaigns That Click: Unleashing the Power of Push Notifications on Mobile Apps

As mobile apps increasingly mediate digital engagement, push notifications have emerged as a key tool for directing user attention, yet systematic evidence on their behavioral and ecosystem-level effects remains limited. Using data from over 200 push campaigns and 60 million user-campaign observations on a leading U.S. mobile-offer marketplace, we combine large-scale observational analyses with controlled experiments to study how push notifications shape user engagement. We find that push notifications significantly increase same-day click-throughs to advertised merchants, with substantial heterogeneity across merchant characteristics, user characteristics, message design, and delivery timing. Beyond focal-merchant responses, notifications are associated with increased engagement with non-advertised merchants both within and across categories, suggesting that push notifications reshape attention across the marketplace ecosystem. Both the large-scale empirical analysis and controlled experiments yield evidence consistent with two complementary mechanisms—content-driven processing of notification information and reminder-based attention activation. The results also identify attentional saturation as a key boundary condition—repeated exposure produces diminishing responsiveness and may even reduce engagement at high notification frequencies. These findings position push notifications as a mobile-native attention-allocation lever that platforms can strategically deploy, while underscoring the need to balance engagement gains against user fatigue and attention costs.