Continuing ASO: trends, ratings and a bit of feedback

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

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

From the same circumstance, the following results: from the whole variety on the market, the user will select your application if the screenshots clearly and clearly display the functionality. By the way, optimization of screenshots on average increases conversion to installation by 17.39%
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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 the pages of applications devoted to shopping, fitness and travel are browsing the longest. But here, too, things are not so simple - with the tightening of competition, the task of finding not only a promising niche, but also the right audience, is becoming more and more urgent. Therefore, a clear audience segmentation is a mandatory measure. For example, the developers of the Blacklane taxi application conducted a statistical analysis and found that in the US, 31% of trips are business, and in Canada and Australia, the same segment falls on family trips. Having made various promotions for the above-mentioned countries, the company has significantly increased conversion to the installation.

Speaking about the forms of submission 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 dictates the conditions in which the chances to attract users through video decreased. This is superimposed 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 you shouldn’t completely abandon them. The main thing is not to exceed the recommended timing (the average duration of watching a video is now 11 seconds) and test the results.

And here are some more numbers:

• Every day, about 8,000 new applications go to the market
• fewer users, in principle, put applications on the device
• 80% of those who put 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 arrive at 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 concisely describe the key features, you can significantly raise the TTR.
• The visual component is becoming increasingly important, as for new generations it 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 take a quick look at the above, you may get the impression that the rating and reviews are not particularly important for achieving high performance. But this is not so - despite the fact that users read less and less, they have not forgotten how to write. Therefore, as soon as negative comments appear on the page, and the issue decreases, you need to start working with ratings and feedback - and even better, if this work will be carried out on an ongoing basis.

How and why to engage in ratings and reviews?

When raising the rating:

• Increases the number of hits in the store
• Conversion to installation increases
• Improved application reputation (user loyalty, retention)
• The possibility of getting into feature increases.

Demography

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

With paid promotion, you need to be prepared for the fact that users who come from the purchased traffic can leave negative feedback. Accordingly, if the application has serious flaws that can provoke a negative user reaction, 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 “big” brand that has its own application, then you need to carefully monitor the rating. If the user sees a low mark next to the big name, it will push him away with a much greater probability than the sluggish rating of the nouneym. Simply put, with greater brand awareness, requirements for the quality of its product also become higher.

What to do with the 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, forcing events through the purchase of reviews, you need to understand what the "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 satisfied with everything, he rarely takes the time to describe in 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 going to write a devastating comment, then, most likely, he will not stop quickly.

If you examine the information in the reviews more closely, you can not only fix bugs more effectively, 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 consider how to implement such functionality.

What to do with negative reviews?

Collect and analyze. Based on the fact that it 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 to the purchase.

But if there are a lot of negative reviews and they affect 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 performing a certain action), the user will be shown a push notification, which will offer to evaluate the application. With a negative assessment, we will send the user to a page with a feedback form where he can pour out his soul, and with a positive one, 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 a negative review on the market.
• On the AppStore, when updating, you can reset the rating to 0 - it will be easier to lift it to the top. This is necessary for applications with a rating lower than 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 evaluations will fill the application page again.
• In August, the app evaluation calculation algorithm will be updated on Google Play - the latest reviews will have more weight. Now you can see the current and predicted estimate 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, purchase reviews.

Purchase reviews

How to do it?

To begin with, let's look at what you shouldn’t do exactly - let's list common mistakes that can be easily 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 studio developer decides to publish reviews in a “bundle”, and this is striking and makes the “paid” ratings obvious - not only for users, but also for moderators. Therefore, it is better to work on placing reviews evenly, after analyzing the dynamics of “organic” ratings, and not to strive to raise the rating from 1 to 5 in 1 day.
• Unrealistic raptures. It is necessary to understand that suspicion can cause not only the appearance of a large number of positive ratings, but also the very content of the responses - what is written in them should correspond to the natural course of thought of your target audience. Learn what users are writing on the page of your application, how they express themselves.
• The discrepancy between 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". Imitating the signs of “organic” in the purchased reviews is a huge advantage, but one 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 stack, three and four stars are much less common than the extreme values ​​— five or one. And when calculating the rating on the table, the highest weight is estimated at five stars. Therefore, the desired “nativeness” of the purchased ratings turns against the customer - you will need to place much more reviews with ratings below five to increase the rating, and three or four stars will not give a meaningful “organic” visibility.

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 a rating does not stop at the purchase itself.

How to make positive reviews visible?

It happens that the reviews are purchased, posted, and even the rating has grown - but on the main page of the application still shows negative ratings. This can happen because reviews on the market have a utility category. In other words, if the feedback was useful to a reader, he could like it, thereby raising the position of this review on the page.

In practice, this means that if the user liked someone's review, he would like, although this is not a guarantee that the review was really useful. Therefore, on the main page of your application, whole stories full of negativity and impartial epithets, or reviews that have nothing to do with functionality, or bugs, or to the application, can take hold. It so happens that the user just 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 was stubbornly hanging in the top. You can try to remove this feedback from the page, marking it as “spam” or “offensive” via the console.

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 to the visible on the target audience area on the page.

Moderation

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

• The store can 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 issuance 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 a feedback and no longer appears in the application, moderators can delete his review.
• In the AppStore, developer responses are moderated, on Google Play they are posted immediately.
• In the AppStore, it is impossible to correct the answers; on Google Play,
• In December, the AppStore goes on vacation, and at this time automatic moderation is enabled - more rigid than semi-automatic. Try to take this into account when planning your accommodation.

What reviews will not be moderated:

• Reviews consisting of UTP applications (that is, in fact, duplicate the description of the functions on the page)
• One type 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 other 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 horror” - use this method carefully.
• You can also insert keywords into developer responses (with the same reservations).
• The publication of estimates without revocation is allowed even in the ratio of 30% with text to 70% without text.

Conversation with users

In order to increase user loyalty, you need to respond to reviews. In this way, you create a sense for the target audience that problems are being solved, the application is being worked on and the user can influence the course of this work. This motivates people to continue using the app.

But to achieve this result, you must follow certain rules:

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

What feedback do you need to answer?

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

What reviews do not need to respond?

• To insult without constructive criticism - you should not enter into a dialogue with the user, who obviously does not need any reaction, but simply releases steam. On such a review should leave a report in the developer console.
• Positive, but not very informative - 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 ones listed above.

We hope that the cycle of articles on optimization was useful to you - and while you apply this knowledge, let's start writing equally important and relevant articles.