Continuing ASO: trends, ratings and a bit of feedback



    Today, as we promised, it is time to research the key trends prevailing in application stores. We will also turn to the topic of ratings and reviews, or rather, to how user feedback affects the success of the application and how you, in turn, can influence it.

    As you know, in a saturated market, the amount of consumer attention tends to decline. At the beginning of 2019, studies of user behavior showed that most view only about 20% of the application page, rarely falling into the review section. That is, all the most important for attracting and holding attention is contained at the top of the page, and these are just four elements: an icon, screenshots, a title + subtitle and / or video. It is with these promo tools that you need to work most meticulously.

    From the same circumstance, the following results: from the whole variety on the market, the user selects your application if the functionality is clearly and clearly displayed in the screenshots. By the way, screenshot optimization on average increases the conversion to installation by 17.39%

    Since the user spends less and less time studying all the functions and features of your product, applications with one key feature become more popular and profitable. It should be noted here that at the moment they are browsing the pages of applications dedicated to shopping, fitness and travel the longest. But here, too, is not so simple - with the toughening of competition, the task of finding not only a promising niche, but also the right audience, is becoming more and more relevant. Therefore, a clear segmentation of the audience is a mandatory measure. For example, Blacklane taxi application developers conducted a statistical analysis and found that in the United States 31% of trips are business, while in Canada and Australia the same segment is for family trips. Having made various promotions for the above countries, the company significantly increased the conversion to the installation.

    Speaking about the forms of presentation of information, we should separately mention the video. Despite the fact that this is a great way to convey to the user all the benefits of your application, a small percentage of the audience watches the videos to the end. Now the market is dictating the conditions in which the chances of attracting users via video have decreased. This is imposed on the considerable cost of producing high-quality video content, and as a result, this promotional tool has recently been less popular with marketers.

    But the videos are still useful and have a good effect on the search TTR, so do not completely abandon them. The main thing is not to exceed the recommended timing (the average duration of watching a video now is 11 seconds) and test the results.

    And here are some more numbers:

    • about 8,000 new applications enter the market every day
    • fewer users, in principle, put applications on the device
    • 80% of those who bet do not become active users
    • 75% of users today will not reopen the application within the first 72 hours.

    Thus, observing current and emerging trends, we come to simple conclusions, taking into account which the application has significantly increased chances of success:

    • The value of the application should be obvious. If it is clear and concise to describe key features, you can significantly increase the TTR.
    • The visual component is becoming increasingly important, as for new generations this is the preferred way of perceiving information. For example, screenshots gradually replace the description and become a much more significant promotional tool.
    • Analysis of the target audience with its subsequent segmentation is now more relevant than ever.

    If you cast a quick glance at the foregoing, you may get the impression that rating and reviews are not particularly important to achieve high performance. But this is not so - despite the fact that users are reading less and less, they have not forgotten how to write. Therefore, as soon as negative reviews appear on the page, and the issuance decreases, you need to start working with ratings and feedback - and even better if this work is carried out on an ongoing basis.

    How and why to do rating and reviews?


    With increasing rating:

    • The number of impressions in the store is increasing.
    • Increased conversion to installation
    • Improving the reputation of the application (user loyalty, retention)
    • The possibility of getting into phishing increases

    Demographics

    According to TUNE research , rating and reviews have a greater impact on the installation. That is, the user makes a decision based on how other users rated the application and what they wrote about it. At the same time, different age groups respond to ratings and reviews to different degrees: they turn out to be the most important for middle-aged people (generation Y).

    With paid promotion, you need to be prepared for the fact that users who come from purchased traffic can leave negative reviews. Accordingly, if the application has serious shortcomings that can provoke a negative reaction of users, you risk dropping the rating by purchasing traffic. Therefore, before this event, it is necessary to prepare a product for the audience and minimize image risks (at least fix critical bugs).

    If you are the owner of a "large" brand that has its own application, then you need to carefully monitor the rating. If a user sees a low rating next to a big name, this will push him away with a much greater probability than a sluggish rating of a no-name. Simply put, with the brand becoming more famous, the requirements for the quality of its product also become higher.

    What to do with a rating?

    First of all, you can pay attention to successful products that have a large number of mostly positive reviews. If you plan to achieve such a result by forcing events through the purchase of reviews, you need to understand what “organic” looks like.

    Based on the analysis of how real users write reviews, the following key points can be highlighted:

    • Real positive feedback is usually short. If a person is happy with everything, he rarely takes the time to detail the benefits. The most likely will be something like "Super !!!", "Everything suits me" or "Good."
    • Negative reviews are almost always detailed. If an angry user is about to write a devastating comment, then most likely he will not stop quickly.

    If you study the information in the reviews more closely, you can not only more efficiently fix bugs, but also use the ideas of users to introduce new features that are guaranteed to be needed. For example, if in 20 reviews out of 100, users write that the application lacks Apple ID integration, the developer should already think about how to implement such functionality.

    What to do with negative reviews?

    Collect and analyze. Based on what exactly does not suit users, you can modify the application in such a way as to increase the loyalty of the audience, and therefore increase the conversion into a purchase.

    But if there are a lot of negative reviews and they affect the conversion and issuance, it is necessary to take specific measures to increase the rating:

    • You can embed a "beggar" of reviews - according to the established condition (after a specified period of time or after a certain action has been taken), the user will be shown a push notification that will offer to evaluate the application. With a negative rating, we will send the user to a page with a feedback form where he can pour out his soul, and with a positive rating he will be asked to go to the store and write a comment about what he liked. Thus, we ourselves motivate the user to evaluate the application and minimize the risk of receiving negative feedback on the market.
    • On the AppStore, when updating, you can reset the rating to 0 - it will be easier to raise it to the top. This is necessary for applications with a rating below 3 stars, and the optimal frequency for using such a tool is no more than once every 3 months. At the same time, you need to be sure that the release, during which you reset the rating, will be of high quality - otherwise negative ratings will fill the application page again.
    • On August Google’s Google Play update will update the app’s grading algorithm - the latest reviews will have more weight. Now you can see the current and forecasted assessment in the console; in some cases, the differences may be more than 1 point. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare for this update of the rating system on the market and, possibly, to buy reviews.

    Buying reviews


    How to do it?

    To begin with, consider what you shouldn’t do exactly - we’ll list common mistakes that can easily be avoided:

    • Uneven purchase. When deciding to purchase reviews, we can post them immediately, or gradually bring them to the market over a period of time. Often, the development studio decides to publish reviews in a "bundle", and this catches the eye and makes the "paid" ratings obvious - not only for users, but also for moderators. Therefore, it is better to work on posting reviews evenly, having analyzed the dynamics of “organic” ratings, and not to strive to raise the rating from 1 to 5 in 1 day.
    • Unrealistic enthusiasm. You need to understand that suspicion can cause not only the appearance of a large number of positive ratings, but also the content of the reviews - what is written in them should correspond to the natural train of thought of your target audience. Learn what users write on the page of your application, how they communicate.
    • Inconsistency of the text of the reviews and the functionality of the application. This should be avoided - be careful when checking purchased reviews.
    • Purchase of “fours” and “triples”. Imitation of the signs of "organic" in the procured reviews is a huge advantage, but you should not buy "more realistic" ratings in the form of three and four stars. When conducting a frequency analysis of the ratings placed on the store, three and four stars are much less common than the extreme values ​​- five or one. And when calculating the rating on the store, the rating of five stars has the greatest weight. Therefore, the desired "nativeness" of the purchased ratings turns against the customer - reviews with ratings below five will need to be placed much more to increase the rating, and there will be no significant visibility of the "organic" rating with a value of three or four stars.

    If you avoid these mistakes when working with the purchase of reviews, then its effectiveness will increase many times and the desired result will be achieved. But the process of working with the rating does not stop at the purchase itself.

    How to make positive reviews visible?


    It happens that reviews are purchased, posted, and even the rating has increased - but negative ratings are still displayed on the main page of the application. This can happen because reviews on the market have a utility category. In other words, if the feedback was useful to some readers, they can like it, thereby increasing the position of this review on the page.

    In practice, this means that if the user liked someone’s review, he would like it, although this does not guarantee that the review was really useful. Therefore, whole stories full of negativity and unpleasant epithets, or reviews that have nothing to do with functionality, bugs, or applications can be fixed on the main page of your application. It happens that a user simply wrote something that came to his head, deciding that it was a good joke, it seemed funny to others, the number of likes was growing and the irrelevant review stubbornly hung in the top. You can try to remove such a feedback from the page by marking it through the console as “spam” or “offensive”.

    On the other hand, positive reviews need to put as many likes as possible - regardless of whether they are purchased or organic - and raise them in the area visible to the target audience on the page.

    Moderation


    Reviews are semi-automatic moderation. When purchasing, consider the following useful facts:

    • The store may not miss from 0% to 90% of reviews - the latter should be expected if the reviews were posted at one time, and their number exceeds the delivery and conversion rates
    • For the purchase of reviews do not banyat.
    • On the AppStore, reviews are tracked for 3 weeks. This means that if a user leaves the feedback and no longer appears in the application, moderators can delete his review.
    • In the AppStore, the responses of the developers are moderated, on Google Play they are posted immediately.
    • It is impossible to correct answers in the AppStore, in Google Play - you can
    • In December, the AppStore goes on vacation, and at that time automatic moderation is switched on - more stringent than semi-automatic. Try to take this into account when planning your placement time.

    What feedback will not pass moderation:

    • Testimonials consisting of a USP application (that is, in fact, duplicating the description of the functions on the page)
    • Same reviews posted without long breaks
    • Reviews containing personal stories - they are often deleted when re-moderated
    • Large, detailed and well-written reviews - they look unnatural and suspicious

    Additional features


    Here we briefly describe a couple of nuances that will be useful when working with reviews:

    • You can use keywords in reviews - this is most relevant for GooglePlay, since the market indexes everything that is written on the application page. But the text should not be “optimized to the point of horror” - use this method carefully.
    • You can also embed keywords in developer responses (with the same caveats).
    • The publication of ratings without recall is allowed even in the ratio of 30% with text to 70% without text.

    Dialogue with users


    In order to increase user loyalty, feedback must be answered. Thus, you create a feeling among the target audience that the problems are being solved, work is underway on the application and the user can influence the course of this work. This motivates people to use the application for a long time.

    But to achieve this result, certain rules must be observed:

    • Feedback needs to be answered quickly. Ideally, no later than two days from the date of placement, because the relevance of the request has time limits. If the developer’s response came in a few months (or even a month later), this will not affect the user who most likely deleted the application if his review was negative, or received information of interest to him from another source.
    • No need to answer "copy-paste". If the user writes: “Developer, I’ve updated, and now nothing works in the app, it crashes! What the hell is this? ”, And you answer him with the stamped“ Thank you for your feedback! ”, There will be little benefit from this. In this case, you must at least apologize and clarify the type and model of the device.
    • You need to stay correct. This is obvious, but it’s better not to violate generally accepted standards of decency. On the AppStore, rudeness may simply not be missed. On Google Play, everything is not so strict, but even if the answer in the style of "fool himself" reaches the addressee, the consequences can be disastrous. User loyalty needs to be increased, do not risk your reputation and profit for the sake of splashing negative in return.

    What reviews need to be answered?

    • On the negative with questions or specific comments - it often happens that the user corrects the assessment after the developer helps him in solving the problem.
    • On the positive, if they are detailed or unusual - by maintaining communication with the user and expressing gratitude to him in response, you will increase loyalty, which means you can achieve higher retention and conversion rates in the purchase.

    What reviews do not need to be answered?

    • To insults without constructive criticism - do not enter into a dialogue with a user who obviously does not need any reaction, but simply releases steam. For such a review, you should leave a report in the developer console.
    • On the positive, but not too substantial - if you have very large marketing budgets and a lot of man hours, you can respond to reviews like “Good, good”, “good”, but it’s better to focus on the above.

    We hope that the series of articles on optimization was useful to you - and while you apply the acquired knowledge, we will start writing equally important and necessary articles.

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