How to Announce Product Updates in Your Web App in 5 Minutes

If you operate a SaaS platform or manage a web app, you know how frequently you need to roll out product updates or introduce new features. Keeping users informed isn’t just helpful — it’s critical to delivering a seamless experience.

Timely notifications help users adjust expectations, reduce confusion, and improve satisfaction. Whether it’s a bug fix or a major launch, being proactive with updates shows that your team values transparency and trust.

With Gleam Capture, you can easily announce product updates or features using our new Notification template. It’s powered by flexible rules that let you target the right users at the right time — all from a single dashboard.

Gleam Capture makes it easy to schedule announcements for product updates to appear at specific times or dates. You can queue multiple messages in advance and archive them once they’re no longer relevant — ensuring that outdated notices don’t clutter your home screen or disrupt your user experience.

Best of all, our popups require just a single line of JavaScript to install. You won’t need to repeatedly update your codebase — every announcement is controlled from the Gleam dashboard. It’s a smart way to save time, reduce developer dependency, and maintain control of real-time messaging across your web app.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to create targeted Notifications inside your web app using Gleam Capture — no dev team required.

We’ll use Gleam’s own platform as a working example to demonstrate how quickly you can highlight new features across devices — whether users are on a desktop, mobile app, or any device to access your platform.

We're going to use our own web app as a demo:

To start sharing your new features, click New Capture from your Gleam dashboard and choose the Notifications template. In this walkthrough, we’ll use the Messages layout — it gives you extra space to highlight key features and provide full context about what’s new.

You can choose between two formats: Light or Broadcast, depending on how visible or persistent you want your message to be. These notification styles help users quickly access updates and understand what’s changed at a glance.

You can pick from the two variations, Light or Broadcast:

Once inside the Design tab, you can customise the layout, visuals, and messaging with Gleam’s flexible customisation options.

Your changes appear instantly in the live preview pane, so you can see how your announcement will look across devices. Whether you're promoting features including tooltips, onboarding walkthroughs, or update summaries, Gleam makes it easy for users to easily access the information they need — without writing extra code. Your custom design will also be immediately reflected in the preview pane:

Beyond the Messages layout, Gleam offers several other formats to help you tailor feature announcements to your users. You can choose from the Image, Bar, or Text layouts — each ideal for different use cases and levels of visibility on your web page or home screen.

These layout options are perfect for announcements that blend into the interface without disrupting user flow, making it easy to communicate changes across platforms like your mobile app or even a photos app interface.

The Image layout is ideal when you want to highlight visual updates, banners, or newly launched UI changes. It's especially useful when showcasing features including design refreshes, onboarding flows, or ai generated visuals.

Because this layout focuses heavily on imagery with minimal text, it helps users quickly access key changes without overwhelming them — perfect for drawing attention without disrupting flow.

The Bar layout is a lightweight way to announce product updates at the top or bottom of your web page. While it doesn't offer space for detailed messaging, you can include a link so users can read more or act immediately. This layout works well for real time status alerts, updates, or other notices your app sends and receives during active sessions. You can set the bar to remain fixed while scrolling, or only display it temporarily — it’s fully customisable to match your design system.

You can also set it to stick to the top or bottom of your page on scroll, or without. It's fully customisable!

The Text layout is perfect for announcing new features with a clear and focused message. It's ideal when your goal is to prompt immediate action — whether it’s directing users to documentation or encouraging them to explore updates within your app. This layout is simple by design, helping users stay focused while allowing you to save time on setup. It’s also a great choice for mobile-first experiences, especially if users are accessing your web app from any device to access your platform.

At the end of the announcement, you may want to include a call-to-action so the user can find out more about a particular feature or start using your new feature immediately.

Typically, this means a link to the new feature's documentation, or a link that brings users right to your app. You can also include a link to your main Updates page so users can go check out what they might have missed out.

If you're using the Light variation, you can add a link to the footer text of your announcement. This option can be found under the Design tab:

If you like, you can also leave this section blank and not include a footer. The section will be automatically removed from your Capture.

If you're using the Broadcast variation, you'll have the option of including a button in your announcement. Under the Design tab, enter your CTA text in the Button Text field.

If you prefer not to have a button, just leave the Button Text field empty.

This button's behaviour can then be configured in the Post Capture tab:

Once you're happy with how your Notification looks, it's time to configure the behavioural rules so that your announcement shows up to the right users.

Gleam Capture comes with a variety of behavioural rules that allow you to show different notifications to a custom audience or segment. This is particularly useful if an update is only available to users of a specific plan, or if the message is for admins only.

Let's look at a few rules you can use to configure your announcement. Note that the rules specified here should be grouped together to form a custom audience:

By default, this rule is included in each Capture so that they don't show up to users who have closed the particular Capture. We recommend keeping this rule so that you don't annoy your users by continuously showing them the same message.

In some cases your update may only be available to users from certain countries. Feel free to use the Country rule to show the announcement to users from a certain country only.

We detect users via their IP address:

You can show the announcement on particular parts of your web app using the Current URL rule. For example, you might have multiple apps under the same platform like we do, so specifying the path is particularly useful for differentiating updates between apps.

The announcement will only show depending on where you set the URL to be.

CSS Selectors are great for picking up keywords or elements on your app so that you can show your announcement to selected users only. It works by looking for a specified element on your page.

In the example below, we're looking for the keyword 'admin' under the user name element:

1. Go to your web app and find the element you would like to match against.
2. Highlight the text in that element and right click, then select Inspect.
3. In the Inspector tool, right click on the highlighted element and select Copy > Copy Selector.

When announcing product updates, you'll want to make sure they are displayed in a timely manner. It's also important to restrict the announcement to a time frame so users don't get the notifications months after a feature has been released.

You can use the Date rule to set a timeframe:

If your CSS selectors or keywords don't show up on the page where you'd like to make an announcement, then you can opt for the Javascript rule. Simply enter a function name from your app that will determine who the announcement gets shown to.

Once again, this could be used for determining if a user is an admin, or if they are using a paid plan, etc.

If none of those rules work for you, feel free to trigger the announcement manually using Javascript. Just insert the manual code anywhere you'd like your announcement to show:

Behavioural rules work better if they are grouped together. It allows you to create more granularity with your segment and make sure that your updates reach a highly relevant audience.

Once you've figured out your audience and compiled a set of rules, they may look something like this:

So there you go! You can now improve visibility of new features by implementing announcements or notifications in your web app.

Feel free to extend the capability of Captures to include welcome messages for new users, or check in with your users if they have idled for awhile. Have you got any more ideas? Let us know 😊

Make Your Own Feature Announcements

Check out our helpful documentation for step by step instructions on setting up your own Notification or get started right away!