EDIT: With Google discontinuing Nearby Notifications starting on December 6th, 2018, users will no longer be able to receive notifications through Eddystone-URL.
You've probably heard about our introduction of messaging technology for the physical world — Here & Now.
And you're probably wondering how you can take advantage of it to deliver context-aware, configurable-on-the-fly messages to your customers.
As with everything we do at Estimote, we wanted to make sure this is easy to do. To begin with, make sure you enable the Here & Now packet on at least one of your compatible beacons.
Once you have your beacons in hand, you're ready to begin setting up Here & Now.
- Choose the beacon you want to work with and go to the settings
- Enable Here&Now packet and update the changes via Estimote app
- Go to the Estimote Cloud and either log in, or create a new account.
- In the left-hand column, navigate to Here & Now. You will see a list of your compatible beacons:
- Clicking on the Edit button on the right-hand side will let you configure the link for the selected beacon. You can provide both HTTP and HTTPS links. The link will be displayed as a silent notification on Android, and in the Chrome widget (which needs to be installed on the user's device) on iOS.
- Set up your link as needed. Target Web Address is the site you want the Physical Web notification to point to. Title will be displayed as the name of the site, and you can use Description to provide any additional information you'd like.
- After you click Save, the link will be active and broadcasting.
You can then check the clicks, impressions, and estimated foot traffic in the beacon's range using the beacon and links Analytics.
Clicking on the beacon's Details will show you the total data for clicks, impressions, foot traffic, as well as temperature and light fluctuations (after you click on them in the chart's legend) in the beacon's range.
This data is aggregated for all the links ever configured on the beacon.
Underneath the main chart, you can see the distribution of clicks and impressions for individual links, listed as Current Links and Past Links.
Clicking on Links in the left hand navigation bar will let you see the results for individual links.
The same link configured on multiple beacons will be treated as one and the same, which is why you might want to take advantage of the Distribution section to see which beacon is responsible for the most traffic.
Note that while beacons' stats also show additional parameters — foot traffic, light, and temperature — links will not show that data.
Note that Location Beacons are required for Here & Now, and an iOS device is required to enable it.