Why has my rating count dropped or spiked?

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If you can see in Appbot that your rating count is dropping, there are a few common causes that we recommend investigating.

Check the rating count in the relevant app store

Go to the app store and check that the number matches what you see at the top of the Ratings page in Appbot. Your overall ratings count in the app store will look something like this:

clash of clans app store reviews screenshot

It will match with the number you see at the top of the Ratings page in Appbot, in the “Current Live App Store Stats” section of the page, shown below.

Ratings can be updated or deleted

The reviewer can change or delete their rating at anytime in the app stores. Also the App Stores has a moderation system for ratings, whereby if they determine ratings are fraudulent/spam/invalid/etc. they may remove them. They also may reverse that decision and add them back. This causes a fluctuation where your ratings can go up and down. If you reload the page, we fetch data from the App Store again, and the data may change in the mean time.

Review the Ratings Over Time for Rating Count

For this app you can see that there has been a slowing in new ratings. The turning points appears to be around early September 2017 (red arrow on the chart above). There is an obvious change in growth rate of the rating count for this app.

If you see this pattern consider:

– Has your app been using a prompt for user to review your app?

– Was there a change to the way the prompt was presented around the same time as the growth in Ratings slowed?

– Consider whether you might be hitting some limits on how often the stores allow you to prompt for a rating. For example, on iOS apps “You can prompt for ratings up to three times in a 365-day period”. If you prompt too often

Here we can see the prompt was probably introduced around Oct 2017, where ratings started to grow faster, so it worked for around 1 year. This suggests the developers might be prompting too often, and have now hit that 365 day limit.

prompt introduction in ratings over time screenshot

For more information on Ratings…

Check out these resources on Ratings, how to interpret them, how to use the Appbot tools, and how ratings and reviews are different.

You can see our experience with the iOS ratings prompt here.

Tagged: Long tail rating

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About The Author

Stuart Hall

Stuart has been involved in mobile as a developer, blogger and entrepreneur since the early days of the App Store. He built the 7 Minute Workout app in one night and blogged the story of growing the app to 2.3 million downloads before exiting to a large fitness device company. Previously he was the co-founder of the Discovr series of applications which achieved over 4 million downloads.