Amazon Pinpoint FAQs

Q: What is Amazon Pinpoint?

Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to run targeted campaigns to drive user engagement in mobile apps. Amazon Pinpoint helps you understand user behavior, define which users to target, determine which messages to send, schedule the best time to deliver the messages, and then track the results of your campaign.

Amazon Pinpoint is built to scale with your app, enabling you to collect and process billions of events per day, and send millions of targeted push notifications to your users. Get started with Amazon Pinpoint by integrating it into your app when you create your app or add Amazon Pinpoint to an existing app. You can create your Amazon Pinpoint app in AWS Mobile Hub, follow the integration instructions to include the AWS Mobile SDK in your app, and share your notification credentials.

Amazon Pinpoint is included in the AWS Mobile SDK, which supports iOS and Android, or you can use the Amazon Pinpoint REST API directly.

Q: How can I use Amazon Pinpoint features to understand and increase user engagement?

You can use the Amazon Pinpoint Console to view graphical reports for your app, or export your raw data to S3 for further custom analytics

Q: How much does Amazon Pinpoint cost?

Amazon Pinpoint has no upfront costs, no minimum charges, and no subscription fees. You pay only for what you use. Visit the Amazon Pinpoint pricing page for more details.

Q: How is monthly targeted audience calculated for Amazon Pinpoint?

Monthly targeted audience is calculated as the unique users that your campaign engages with during a calendar month. The MTA count is reset at the start of every calendar month.

Q: How often are reports updated?

Amazon Pinpoint is designed to deliver real time analytics. Reports are updated within a few minutes of receiving data from an application.

Q: Which platforms does Amazon Pinpoint support?

Amazon Pinpoint is included in the AWS Mobile SDK, which supports iOS and Android. Additionally, you can use the Amazon Pinpoint REST API to collect app usage data and create engagement campaigns programmatically.

Q: Who owns the data I collect?

Amazon does not own or monetize the data you collect, and does not share it with third parties. We may use the data to improve the service, monitor the health of the service, and provide technical support to you. As with any other AWS service, you are responsible for how you use the tools we provide; this responsibility includes providing any necessary notice or opt-outs to end users and complying with applicable law.

Q: Do I need to integrate the AWS Mobile SDK with my app to use Amazon Pinpoint?

No. You can use the Amazon Pinpoint REST API to send events programmatically.

Q: Do I need to use Amazon Cognito to use the Amazon Pinpoint service?

No. You can initialize Amazon Pinpoint using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) accounts. However, we recommend using Amazon Cognito for security best practices.

Q: What OS versions does Amazon Pinpoint support?

The iOS SDK supports apps running on iOS 7.0 and higher. The Android SDK supports apps running on Android 2.3.3 and higher.

Q: What time zones are the reports displayed in?

Reports are displayed in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).

Q: Is data cached when a user’s device is offline?

Yes, when using the AWS Mobile SDK, data is cached on the user’s device and is uploaded when a network connection is next established.

Q: Is use of the network channel optimized when sending events?

Yes, the events are batched, and sent once per minute. You can also specify the transport to send the events: cellular and Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi only.

Q: Which AWS Regions is the Amazon Pinpoint service available in?

Please refer to the AWS Global Infrastructure Region Table.

Q: How are metrics calculated for the same user using multiple devices?

A user with the same app on two devices, such as an iPhone and an iPad, is counted as two users.

Q: How is a "session" defined?

A session is one use of an app by the user. A session begins when an app is launched (or brought to the foreground), and ends when the app is terminated (or goes to the background). To accommodate for brief interruptions, like a text message, an inactivity period of up to 5 seconds is not counted as a new session. Total daily sessions shows the number of sessions your app has each day. Average sessions per daily active user shows the mean number of sessions per user per day.

Q: When an app goes to the background does its session end?

Yes, the session ends. When the app comes to the foreground, a new session begins.

Q: How are daily and weekly retention defined?

Daily retention is measured by determining the number of users that first used your app on a specific day, came back and used your app in the next 7 days (7-day retention), fourteen days (14-day retention), and thirty days (30-day retention).

Q: How is sticky factor calculated in the User Engagement tab?

Sticky factor is calculated by dividing DAU by MAU. It is the fraction of monthly users using the app on a particular day. For example, if an app has 100K DAU and 300K MAU its sticky factor is .33. A high sticky factor can indicate strong engagement, appeal, and potential monetization opportunities.

Q: What are demographics in Amazon Pinpoint?

The Demographics tab provides a breakdown of the device attributes for your app users. You can also see custom attributes that you define.

Q: What are Events?

Custom events are defined entirely by you. They help track user actions specific to your app or game. The Events tab provides a view of how often custom events occur. Custom events can be filtered based on attributes and their associated values.

You create custom events by naming them, such as "Item Bought" or "Button Pressed", and then adding context by specifying attributes (for qualitative measure) and metrics (for quantitative measure). For example, if your business goal is to track purchases of items from within the app, you can use "Item Bought" as a custom event, "Item XYZ" as an attribute, and "Item Price" as the metric. The custom events report enables you to search and filter for each attribute or metric. For example, you can find how often "Item XYZ" was purchased or how often “Item Price” was $1.99. You can also review the weighted average of metric values (per session) and track minimum, maximum, or average metric values. As a best practice, we recommend that custom event names be broad and attribute names be specific.

Q: What are the benefits of using custom events?

Custom events help you understand user actions specific to your app. A game developer might want to understand both how often a level is completed and how much health each player has left at the end of that level. With custom events, you can create an event called "level_complete", with "add_level" as an attribute, and "health" as an attribute value. Each time a level is completed, you can record a "level_complete" event with the name of the level and the player's health. By reviewing the data in the Events tab, you might discover that level 3 is too easy because players always finish with maximum health. You could then adjust the level's difficulty to better challenge and engage players, which might improve retention.

Q: Are there limits for using custom events in my app?

You can have up to 1,500 unique custom event types per app and up to 40 attributes and metrics per custom event. For more information on these and other limits affecting custom events, see the Amazon Pinpoint documentation.

Q: What are segments?

Segments are defined with usage attributes. These attributes include usage criteria (such as when the app was last used), device attributes (such as app version, platform, and country), and custom attributes that you define. You use these attributes to define a subset of users from within your total user base. Segments can also be a static list of pre-defined users.

Q: What are custom attributes?

Amazon Pinpoint provides 40 custom attributes. You can use these to customize your segmentation for your unique use cases. Each custom attribute can store up to 50 values.

Q: How do I create segments?

To create a segment, you can build a segment or import a segment.

By building a segment, you can define a segment with criteria for usage, device attributes, and custom attributes.

By importing a segment, you can import a static list of users from a CSV or a JSON file that is stored in Amazon S3.

Q: What are campaigns?

Campaigns are targeted push notification messages sent to a subset of users on a predefined schedule. You can use targeted push notification campaigns to increase app user engagement and retention. You can create push notification campaigns for use cases such as welcoming new customers, informing customers of new features, and sharing offers and deals with customers.

Q: What is a standard campaign?

Standard campaigns define a target audience, the message to be sent, and a schedule for sending the message. You can also reuse previously defined segments or define a new segment while you create a campaign. For every scheduled instance of a campaign, Amazon Pinpoint recalculates the current audience size based on segment filters defined.

Q: What is an A/B test campaign?

A/B campaigns are campaigns with more than one treatment. Each treatment differs from the other based on the message or the sending schedule.

Q: What are silent push notifications and in-app notifications? How do I use them?

Silent and in-app notifications are messages delivered to the device that are not displayed in the notifications center of the user’s device. These messages have a header that enables developers to manage app configuration or create an in-app message center for their apps.

Q: What metrics can I track for standard campaigns?

For standard campaigns, you can track messages sent, messages delivered, direct app opens, sessions per user, purchases per user, delivery rate, open rate, user devices messaged, and campaign sessions by time of day.

Q: What are my scheduling options for campaigns?

Campaigns can be scheduled to run one time immediately or at a time you designate in the future. They can also be scheduled with multiple runs – hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Just set up a start date, start time, specify whether you want to deliver on local time, set an end date, and set a time to define your recurring campaigns.

Q: How does local time delivery work for campaign scheduling?

Local time delivery enables you to create campaigns and deliver messages to your users in their local time. Local time delivery can be set up by choosing the local time option and then selecting the time zone to start your first send.

Q: My question isn’t answered in this FAQ. How can I reach Amazon for help?

Please email us for further help, or visit the Amazon Pinpoint forum.

Q: How do I make a new feature request or provide feedback on this product?

Please let us know on the Amazon Pinpoint forum.

Q: I have a question about pricing.

Please email us.