“What’s the difference between Ratings and Reviews?” is our most frequently asked question, by far!
Ratings are a star score from 1-5 stars that may or may not also contain a review.
A Review has a star rating as well as a text comment.
This leads to our 2nd most frequently asked question:
Q: Where in Appbot can I find star ratings that match the app stores?
A: To see numbers that match what you see in the app stores head to the Ratings page in Appbot. All other pages in Appbot and emails from Appbot analyze Reviews only.
Every other page of Appbot looks at reviews only. If you compare the stats from these other pages with the app stores you’ll generally see different figures. In general, there are far fewer reviews than ratings for any app. The average star rating for reviews will also usually be different from the average star rating for ratings.
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Here’s an example using Clash Royale on iOS. We see identical ratings and average stars on the Ratings page in Appbot and on the App Store. Make sure you have the same country selected in Appbot (in the filter pane on the right) as you do in the App Store. You can see the country you’re in in the App Store at the very bottom of the page.
However, if we head to any other page of Appbot we’ll see different numbers.
On the Reviews page we see 709,857 reviews, which is much lower than the figure we saw on Ratings.
There are two reasons for this:
- There are filters set at the right of the page that have been applied. Both the Reviews page and Ratings page are showing all data since September 2006.
- On this page Appbot only counts reviews with text.
Q: How do I interpret Ratings and Reviews?
Ratings
These are extremely important because when someone lands on your app page it’s the main thing they use to judge the quality of your app. A high rating and a decent volume greatly increase conversion. Unfortunately, there isn’t too much you can take away from ratings, except that hopefully, you are trending upwards. Ratings prompts can be extremely effective in increasing ratings.
Reviews
Unsolicited feedback like this is extremely valuable to product teams. It can early alert on bugs and crashes, give you new product ideas, help you find advocates and much more. It’s also really important to reply to negative reviews to both help the user and also ease concerns on potential new customers reading that review on the stores. Note that reviews are usually more negative then your ratings.
If you have questions relating to this, or any other part of the Appbot service, please get in touch