Uninstall tracking

Uninstall tracking in Braze provides the following details:

1. Daily app-level uninstall statistics in a time series graph on the Home page.
2. Campaign-level uninstall statistics in a time series graph on the Campaign Details page of a specific campaign. This statistic specifies the number of campaign recipients that uninstall each day.

Showing aggregate uninstalls over time can help you visualize trends and anomalies so that you can monitor app uninstalls with ease. Similarly, tracking campaign-level uninstalls can reveal whether a specific campaign is driving or preventing app uninstalls.

Braze automatically collects a base level of uninstall information from your regular push campaigns. However, because the frequency that different users receive push campaigns may vary, Braze offers Uninstall Tracking to provide a more accurate snapshot of uninstall activity among your users.

Implementation

You can enable uninstall tracking on the App Settings page, under Settings, for each app you are interested in tracking.

When uninstall tracking is enabled for an app, background push messages will be sent nightly to users who have not recorded a session or received a push in 24 hours.

If you are interested in filtering Braze background push on iOS, you can use a utility method. On Android, you can use BrazeNotificationUtils.isUninstallTrackingPush() to detect uninstall push. When Braze detects an uninstall, whether from Uninstall Tracking or normal push campaign delivery, we will record the best estimated time of the uninstall on the user. This time is stored in the user profile as a standard attribute.

This time can be used to define a segment of users for win-back campaigns. Using the “Uninstalled” filter on the Segments page, you can select users who uninstalled your app within a time range. Since determining the exact time of an uninstall is difficult, we recommend that uninstall filters have wider time ranges to make sure everyone who uninstalls falls into the segment at some point.

App-level analysis

Daily statistics on uninstalls are found on the Home page. The visualization can be broken down by segment, similar to other statistics Braze provides. Set View Statistics For to “Usage Analytics”, and then select “Uninstalls” from the dropdown to display the graph.

The graph can then be broken down by segment and app using the dropdowns.

Uninstall tracking for campaigns

Campaign uninstall tracking allows you to see the number of users who received a specific campaign and subsequently uninstalled your app within the selected time frame. This tool gives marketers insight into how campaigns may be encouraging unintended negative user behaviors and helps to measure overall campaign efficacy.

Braze tracks uninstalls by observing when push messages sent to users’ devices return a signal from either Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) or Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) that the app is no longer installed. If Global Uninstall Tracking is enabled for a particular app, Braze sends a daily silent push message to users to detect whether they have uninstalled. This “silent” push is sent to all users (unless the user has disabled silent pushes in their app settings), however it does not appear to users. If Braze detects that a user has uninstalled, that platform:

• Increments the app’s total uninstall count by 1.
• Increments the uninstall count for every campaign that the user successfully received in the past 24 hours by 1.
• If a user receives 3 campaigns in a 24 hour period and then uninstalls, we will increment the count of “uninstalls” for all 3 campaigns.

Uninstall tracking is subject to restrictions placed on this information by FCM and APNs. Braze only increments the uninstall count when FCM or APNs tells us that a user has uninstalled, but these third-party systems reserve the right to notify us of uninstalls at any point in time. As a result, Uninstall Tracking should be used to detect directional trends as opposed to precise statistics.

For more on using uninstall tracking, see this blog post.

Uninstall statistics for campaigns are located on the Campaign Details page. For multichannel and multivariate campaigns, uninstalls can be broken down by channel and variant, respectively.

Troubleshooting

Why am I seeing a spike in uninstalls all of a sudden?

If you see a spike in app uninstalls, it may be due to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) and Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) revoking old tokens at a different frequency.