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Navigating App Store Ratings & Reviews is Tricky.

BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE.

3TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

USING THIS GUIDE SECTION 1. UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS It Starts With Empathy How Ratings Drive Behavior The Difference A Single Star Can Make The Math of App Store Ratings Case Study: Tinder

SECTION 2. UNDERSTANDING APP STORE REVIEWS Reviews Matter Too The Challenge of Reviews Who’s Reviewing Your App? The Negative Bias In Reviews

SECTION 3. KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE APP STORE AND PLAY STORE The App Store Offers More Volatile Ratings and Rankings But… The Play Store Offers More Freedom for Marketers

SECTION 4. IMPROVING RATINGS WITH INTELLIGENT PROMPTS What is a Ratings Prompt? What Makes a Prompt Intelligent? A Few Best Practices A Better Way to Communicate - A Message from the Apptentive CEO Case Study: Urbanspoon

SECTION 5. IMPROVING REVIEWS BY GIVING CUSTOMERS A VOICE Driving 5-Star Reviews with Better Support Channels for Customer Communication Managing Negative Reviews SECTION 6. BEYOND THE STARS: OPTIMIZING FOR THE APP STORE ASO, & Other Tools for the Savvy Mobile Marketer Our Top 10 ASO Tips Trends in Mobile Marketing

FINAL THOUGHTS & CONCLUSION TL/DR CREDITS

Don’t have time to read the full guide? CHECK OUT THE HIGHLIGHTS ON PAGE 54

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Today, there are over 1.3 million apps in the Google Play Store, 1.2 million in the Apple Play Store, over 300 thousand in the Windows Phone Store, and 240,000 in the Amazon Appstore. The growth of mobile apps is only accelerating, with the Play Store in particular doubling its total number of apps in 2014.

Put simply, the mobile app marketplace is crowded.

In addition, there are over 400,000 independent app developers all fighting for the attention of the same potential customers. The Apple App Store saw 128,000 new business apps alone in 2014 and the mobile gaming category alone has competition to the tune of almost 300,000 apps.

As a result of the increasingly competitive nature of the app stores:

Less than one percent of apps are considered profitable. Many mobile publishers adopt an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. In contrast, getting those crucial first customers- rather than building the app -may prove to be your biggest challenge.

Continued increases in mobile acquisition costs have driven the Cost Per Loyal User (CPLU) to an all-time high. Increased organic traffic as a result of making your app easier to discover can take some of the burden off of paid advertising to drive adoption.

Introduction

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250,000

500,000

750,000

1,000,000

1,250,0001,250,000

1,500,000

Google Play Apple App Store

Windows Phone Store

Amazon Appstore

Blackberry World

1,300,0001,200,000

300,000 240,000130,000

Nu

mb

er o

f Ap

ps

Source: Statista

INTRODUCTION

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The app market is only going to grow, with the total number of mobile app downloads expected to exceed 268 billion and generating over $77 billion by 2017. This means that the market is getting even more competitive and standing out in the app stores is nothing short of a gargantuan task- unless, that is, you put an app store strategy into place early.

And, you’ve taken the first step by downloading this guide.

What does this have to do with ratings and reviews?

App store ratings and reviews are the lifeblood of any mobile app.

They’re the first impression a potential customer has of your app, the rare indicator of quality in an often-blind app discovery process, and the key to improving your app’s ranking in an app store search.The #1 way people discover new apps among the 1.3+ million apps in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store is general browsing of the app stores, while browsing “top rated” or “most popular” was the third most common method.

The key to both getting your app to rank prevalently in search results and getting your app featured in app store top charts – the key to making your app ‘discoverable’ - is better app storeratings and reviews.

To see evidence of just how instrumental ratings and reviews are to an apps success, go no further than your favorite app store. We did a little digging around in the Android Play Store to see what sort of correlation exists between ratings, downloads, and revenue across the store’s various Top Charts, and found a few not-so-startling statistics:

NEW APP DISCOVERY METHODS

63%General browsing in an app store

Speaking with friends or family

Browsing “top rated” or “most popular”apps lists in an app store

Application(s) was already installedwhen I got my phone

On a social networking website

General browsing on the internet/on other websites

Searching via an internet search engine

Seeing an ad in a magazine or newspaper

Reading Blogs

58%

50%41%

34%25%

20%23%

19%15%

16%13%

14%16%

7%4%

7%6%

iOSAndroid

Source: European Technographics Consumer Technology Online Survey, Q4 2012

98% of this week’s top 100 free apps had an average star rating of at least 4.0

92% of this week’s top 100 paid apps had an average star rating of at least 4.0

99% of this week’s 100 top grossing apps had an average star rating of at least 4.0

INTRODUCTION

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SIMPLY PUT, STAR RATINGS MATTER.

So much so that many mobile app developers equate star ratings with the overall customer experi-ence. They base their entire product roadmap off of feedback from reviews in the hopes that they are addressing the issues noted 1-star reviews will improve the experience and drive higher reviews.

The only problem? Ratings and reviews are biased.

As you will see throughout this guide, a poorly rated app is not necessarily a bad app. Nor is an app with exceptional reviews necessarily a good app. When it comes to assessing quality and experience, app store ratings and reviews are, simply, not the best indicators.

The Mobile Marketer’s Guide to App Store Ratings & Reviews will show you not only what biases to be aware but what you can do to control those biases and make ratings and reviews work in your favor.

The inherent biases in ratings and reviews

As funny as they are, these two XKCD comics raise a few startling points.

First, reviews rarely map to the metrics and issues you need to be concerned about. In the comic above, the app failed to meet its single purpose – yet, this was overshadowed by the more numerous reviews of secondary elements of the app. As we’ve seen time and time again, reviews are often in the shape of crash reports or customer wish lists. The app store is all too often a last-ditch channel of communication with the app publisher when all other channels are closed.

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Second, a four-star rating is an exceptional feat that a very small proportion of apps achieve. Yet, with your competitors increasingly raising the bar on app quality, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out and grab market share. A four-star rating is fantastic. But if your competitor has four and a half stars, your potential customers are going to try their app first.

Before you stress about that extra half a star, it’s important to realize a few of the reasons why your app may be lagging behind your competitor’s. (Hint: It’s not because your competitor has a better app.)

App store ratings and reviews often suffer as a result of a few inherent biases that can be detrimental to even the best apps in the market:

THE NEGATIVE BIAS.People are 33% more likely to leave a rating or a review after a negative experience with the app than they are for a positive experience. As a result, app store ratings are often artificially low.

THE WHEN-AND-WHERE BIAS.When it comes to prompting customers to leave a rating, seemingly small things – including the frequency, location, and timing of prompts – can make a big difference on both the quality and the quantity of your ratings. If done wrong, prompts can even lead to lower ratings as people go out of their way to leave one-star ratings after an irritating or disruptive prompt. As we’ll explore later in this guide, there’s a big difference between asking for ratings and intelligently asking for ratings.

43%57%

% of respondents that reported leaving reviews after a negative experience

% of respondents that reported leaving reviews after a positive experience

THE SELF-SELECTION BIAS.Only a very small proportion of your mobile customers will ever leave a rating or review. Even worse, this proportion further tends to be a non-representative sample. Ratings are typically left by a few vocal critics and a few vocal fans, leaving out the ‘silent majority’ of customers who neither love nor hate your app, but nonetheless constitute most of your mobile revenue.

On average, only one in 27 customers will ever vocalize a complaint with the app. Most of the other 26 will simply close out of the app without ever coming back. Yet, letting a few negative reviews dictate your product roadmap and customer experience priorities – effectively ‘letting the squeaky wheel get the grease’ – can lead to focusing on the wrong areas for improvement.

See Section 4.4 for more on the negative bias.

See Section 5 for more on the when-and-where and self-selection biases.

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Removing the Bias

Fortunately, there are a number of things today’s savvy mobile app publisher can do to minimize the inherent bias of app store ratings and reviews. These include:

‘Giving a voice’ to the silent majority to achieve a more representative sample of ratings and reviews by motivating more of your mobile customers to leave a review.

Reducing the negative bias with intelligent rating prompts.

Filtering minor bug reports and feature requests out of the public app store reviews by pro-viding in-app channels of communication and two-way dialog between your app or company and your customers.

Addressing and managing negative reviews to reduce customer churn and turn critics into advocates.

Complementing your app’s ratings and reviews with a more holistic app store optimization strategy to make it easier for potential customers to discover your app, even if your ratings and reviews lag behind your competition’s.

Over the next six sections, Apptentive’s Mobile Marketer’s Guide to App Store Ratings & Reviews will provide actionable recommendations for each of the aforementioned strategies of boosting the quality and quantity of your reviews. In the process, we will quantify just how important star rat-ings and reviews are to the health of your mobile app.

We will introduce a few differences between the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store – and what those differences mean for ratings and reviews. We’ll also present two original case studies and an additional resources page highlighting some of the best practices for improving your mobile marketing efforts.

Enjoy!

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INTRODUCTION

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About the Data

Unless otherwise cited, the guiding statistics of this eBook come from:

Historical data from delivering over 160 million interactions and ratings prompts within Apptentive-integrated mobile apps, covering how engagement drives ratings, reviews, and the collection of customer insights.

Apptentive’s 2015 Consumer Survey, and associated data from a diverse sample of 350 U.S. smartphone owners, covering how star ratings correlate with an individual’s in-tent-to-download; how important reviews are for both free and paid mobile apps; how con-sumers discover new apps within a crowded app store; the circumstances that motivate users to leave ratings and reviews; and, the circumstances that lead ratings and reviews to motivate user behavior.

A Few Words on Language

PEOPLE, NOT USERSYou’ll notice that the word “user” is rarely used in this eBook. That was intentional. One of our core philosophies is that your app “users” are people. It’s the genuine understanding that on the other side of your screen is another living, breathing, thinking human being

If you humanize your customers, they will respect you more. If you listen to your customers, they will respond by helping you with your product roadmap, alerting you of bugs and thank-ing you by leaving positive reviews in the app store.

THE ‘APP STORE’Unless otherwise noted, the use of the lowercase ‘app store’ is not bounded by any specific platform. The app store, used generically, can be used for whichever marketplace distributes your app - prominently, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Any platform-specific differences will be explicitly called out (See Section 3).

How To Use This Guide

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

UnderstandingApp Store Ratings

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Let’s face it: All app publishers want to see more ratings and reviews. Nothing’s more infuriating than struggling to even get half a percent of the people using your app to leave a rating.

The harsh truth is that asking for a rating or a review is asking a lot of your customers. Between being shown a ratings prompt and leaving a rating or review, there are no fewer than six steps (as illustrated on the following page) that a person must go through – including leaving the app and signing into the app store.

The average mobile app session is roughly five minutes long, with one third of engagements lasting under one minute. The process of leaving a rating or a review can easily take this long. Therefore, it’s incredibly important to give customers an app worth rating.

If a person takes all that time to leave a review, chances are they have either a strong positive or a negative reaction to the app. Make it a positive one.

It Starts With Empathy

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

) :

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Step 1:Trigger the rating prompt and opt to rate the app

Step 2: Wait as the app store launches with the app’s landing page loaded. Navigate to reviews.

Step 3: load the Reviews page and scroll down.

Step 4: ‘Select Write a Review’ Step 5: Sign in to the App Store Step 6: Rate the app, write a review (op-tional), and hit send.

From Prompting To Rating

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

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How Ratings Drive Behavior

App store ratings are crucial to driving rankings, discovery, downloads, updates, and in-app purchases.

Driving App Store Search Rankings & Discovery

As seen in the previous chapter, ratings are an integral part of the ranking algorithm for app searches in both the App Store and the Play Store.

In mid 2013, Apple changed its app store search algorithm to place a greater level of importance on ratings and reviews, rewarding higher rated apps and penalizing lower rated apps. After this update, apps with an average rating under three stars ranked significantly lower while apps with ratings of at least 4 stars experienced a bump in ranking:

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

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While neither Apple nor Google have revealed specifics about how they calculate search rankings, it is generally accepted that both app stores factor in:

Rating/Review Quantity

Rating/Review Quality

Download count

App Usage statistics (How engaged are the people using your app? How frequently do they use your app?)

Uninstalls (How much customer churn does your app experience?)

Growth (How have daily download counts changed over time?)

Keyword density of the app’s landing page (See Section 6 – Beyond the Stars: Optimizing for the App Store)

At the time of writing this guide, no comprehensive study has been conducted on the importance of app store rankings in driving traffic, but there are a few lessons we can learn from App Store Op-timization’s (ASO) older brother, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When it comes to the correla-tion between rank order and click-throughs on a search engine results page, we see a few startling statistics: The top-ranking result gets 56% of clicks

Combined, the top 5 highest ranking results get 88% of clicks

It might not seem like much, but outranking your competitor – even by a single rank – can make all the difference.

Source: SEO Researcher

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

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Driving Downloads

After reaching the app’s landing page, star ratings continue to play a big role in the consumer adoption process.

Even more astonishing, only 8% reported that star ratings had little or no influence on their evaluation of an app.

Driving Updates & In-App Purchases

Star ratings continue to have a strong influence on the customer journey long after the app is downloaded and installed.

Keep in mind that both of these scenarios require people to leave the app, launch the app store, and navigate to the app’s landing page. The more effort required to check your star rating, the more important your ratings become.

Our study revealed that 59% of people usually or always check ratings before downloading an app – even if everything else checks out.

Our survey revealed that 33% of people usually or always check ratings before updating to a newer version of an app and 37% check before making an in-app purchase.

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

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0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

% of consumers willing to consider downloading an app

Source: Apptentive 2015 Consumer SurveyThe Mobile Marketer’s Guide to App Store Ratings & Reviews

Are You Reaching Your Total Market?

The Difference a Single Star Can Make

We asked smartphone across the country what they considered to be the minimum star rating they’d accept in order for them to consider downloading an app.

The results? Only 15 percent said they would consider downloading an app with a 2-star average rating

50 percent would consider downloading an app with a 3-star rating

96 percent would consider downloading an app with a 4-star rating

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

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This data reveals that not only do star ratings matter, but that a single star can make a huge difference. You may be sacrificing a dramatic increase in active users by not managing your flow of ratings and reviews,.

Jumping from a 2-star to a 3-star rating effectivelyincreases your app store conversion by 340 percent.

Jumping from 3 to 4 stars increases yourconversion by an additional 89 percent.

Imagine you had a two-star app with 100k loyal customers. Not bad, by any means… but have you reached the full potential of your addressable market?

According to our survey, jumping to a 3-star average could net you an additional 240k customers. Even more astonishing, jumping again to a 4-star average could bring in another 300k customers for a total of 640k mobile customers.

175,000

350,000

525,000

700,000

0Current Market

Potential Market

What is the Opportunity Cost of a 2-Star App Store Rating?

Source: Apptentive 2015 Consumer SurveyThe Mobile Marketers Guide to App Store Ratings & Reviews

App

Dow

nloa

ds

App Store Ratings

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

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The Math of App Store Ratings

Interested in seeing what effect a change in your average star rating will have on your app store conversion?

Using our survey data, we’ve estimated the difference in app store conversion resulting from incre-mental changes to the average star rating.

These numbers have been validated with our historical data of working with thousands of mobile apps, and we’ve seen that they hold true regardless of both platform and the brand power of the app.

How would a change in your average star rating impact your app store conversion?

30%

340%

730%

770%

280%

540%

570%

89%

97%

4%

Jumping from... To... Is Expected to Increase App Store Conversion by...

Source: Apptentive 2015 Consumer SurveyThe Mobile Marketer’s Guide to Ratings & Reviews

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

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Case Study: Tinder

What happens to app store rankings and discoverabilitywhen you drop 2 ½ stars overnight?

On March 2, 2015, Tinder – the enormously popular dating app developed by IAB – attempted to cash in on its rapid growth and rolled out a new paid service, Tinder Plus, to the company’s previously-free dating app.

To little surprise, customers weren’t thrilled to be asked to pay up for match-making features that were previously free. Without an in-app channel to communicate their issues with the developers, many took straight to the app store in the form of ratings and reviews. Within two weeks, Tinder had accumulated 6,500 new 1-star ratings, dropping their average star rating from 4 stars to 1 1/2 stars.

How did this impact how the app ranked in the iTunes App Store? Let’s take a look –

On the morning of March 2 – just prior to the launch of Plus – Tinder’s iOS app was the 3rd high-est ranked app in the Lifestyle Apps category and the 55th highest ranked overall. Worldwide, the app was featured 207 times in iTunes.

On March 8 – after accumulating enough 1-star reviews to drag down the average rating – Tin-der’s rankings dropped dramatically to the 7th highest ranked Lifestyle App and 105th in overall rankings. The number of times the app was featured in iTunes dropped to nine.

March 2Tinder was the 3rd highest ranked app in the Apple App Store for Lifestyle Apps & the 55th highest ranked overall. The app was featured 207 times in App Store charts.

March 8Tinder dropped to the 7th highest ranked lifestyle app and to 105th in overall ranking. The number of times the app was featured in App Store charts dropped to 9.

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE RATINGS

UnderstandingApp Store Reviews

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Reviews Matter, Too

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE REVIEWS

Ratings and reviews are often lumped together to the point where the only meaningful metric seems to be those coveted stars. Nevertheless, reviews serve an important role that goes beyond the rating they’re associated with.

FIRST, REVIEWS QUALIFY YOUR RATINGS. A four-star average rating is an indicator that your app is a good fit for most people but a compatible review indicates that your app is a good fit for a specific person. It’s necessary to have both the social proof only achieved through a high volume of positive ratings and the more personal recommendation that speaks to the few points someone evaluating your app for the first time might be interested in.

SECOND, REVIEWS PROVIDE VALUABLE FEEDBACK FOR IMPROVING YOUR APP. Mobile marketers can stress over ratings all they want; but at the end of the day, ratings don’t provide actionable insights. A poor rating gives no indication of what you can do to improve future ratings, nor does a good rating tell you what you’re doing right and what areas your limited engineering resources are seeing the most return on their investment.

REVIEWS ARE DIFFERENT. They provide a channel (all too often the only channel) for customers to tell you exactly what they want in an app – to leave feedback, report crashes, and make feature requests. Mobile marketers and developers alike should keep a close eye on their reviews to identify customer pain points, which can then be used to design a product roadmap and experience your customers actually want.

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Everyone reads reviews.

Reviews are deeply intertwined into the app discovery and evaluation process. In fact, 70% of people read at least one review before downloading an app. Not only this but 75% of our survey respondents identified reviews as a key driver for downloading an app, and 42% view app store reviews as equally or more trustworthy than personal recommendations.

Even more astonishing, 13% of people read at least seven reviews when considering a free app. This number jumps to 33% for people evaluating a paid app.

Beyond boosting your download count, reviews can be used to move the needle on a number of key metrics:

Considering that reviews are, by default, shown in chronological order (latest first), it’s important to have not only positive reviews but also a high volume of recent good reviews. In other words, if 33% of your app store traffic reads at least seven reviews, it’s important to do everything you can to ensure that your latest seven reviews are all positive.

But few people leave reviews…

Getting seven recent positive reviews, of course, is easier said than done as only 36% of those surveyed have left an app store review within the past year. Throughout the remainder of this section, as well as in Section 5: Improving Reviews by Giving Customers a Voice, we’ll go over a few ways to boost both review quality and quantity.

The Challenge of Reviews

APP INSTALLS58% of people usually or always check reviews before installing an app.

APP UPDATES33% of people usually or always check reviews before updating to a newer version of an app.

MOBILE REVENUE.36% of people usually or always check reviews before making an in-app purchase.

The Challenge of Reviews

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE REVIEWS

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Who’s Reviewing Your App?

Who exactly are these 36% of people that left a review in the past year, and when and why are they reviewing your app?

According to our data, reviews are typically in response to one of five experiences:

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE REVIEWS

of survey respondents expressed likelihood

to leave a review after a negative experience

with an app.

65% of survey respondents

expressed likelihood to leave a review after a positive experience

with an app.

49% of survey respondents

expressed likelihood to leave a review to report a bug in the

app.

43%

of survey respondents expressed likelihood to leave a review to

suggest a new feature for the app.

22% of survey respondents

expressed likelihood to leave a review to

comment on a version difference after an update of the app.

15%

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The Negative Bias in Reviews

On the previous page we saw that 65% of people are likely to leave a review after a negative experience while only 49% of people leave reviews after a positive experience.

This data is consistent with what we’ve seen online and in-store. The propensity to share a bad customer experience is twice as high as that for a good experience. And the bias is only getting worse as 58% of respondents said they were more likely to tell others about poor customer service experiences than they were five years ago, according to a 2013 Dimensional Research study.

And here’s where it gets interesting…

When it comes to the app stores, about half of all reviews are prompted in app. When we broke down our data by those who most commonly leave prompted reviews and those who most commonly leave unprompted reviews, we found:

IN OTHER WORDS, PROMPTING WORKS.

But there is still a slight negative bias in prompted app store reviews. In section 5, we’ll go over a few tips for managing the inevitable negative review and ensuring that this bias is as controlled as possible.

DID YOU KNOW?It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.

Source: “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner

Unprompted reviews are 56% more likely to be based on negative experiences than positive experiences.

Prompted reviews are only 19% more likely to be based on negative experiences than positive ones.

UNDERSTANDING APP STORE REVIEWS

K E Y D I F F E R E N C E S B E T W E E N

the App Store & the Play Store

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The App Store Offers More Volatile Ratings & Rankings

One of the most important differences between the two leading app stores, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, is how they handle app ratings. The Apple App Store presents both historic ratings (an average of all ratings since the app’s launch) and, more prominently, the aver-age rating for the current version of the app. Because of this, iOS apps typically suffer from low ratings for a one-week period after launching a new update, but offer publishers more control over boosting their ratings with a well-received update. Google Play Store ratings are more his-toric and harder to change without a significant volume of new reviews.

According to a study of 25,000 apps conducted by venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz, iOS rank-ings are significantly more volatile than Android rankings. The rank of an Android app rarely moves more than 12 slots in a day, while that of an iOS app can move up to 50 slots daily. Fur-thermore, ranking volatility for Android apps is pretty consistent regardless of your app’s rank – meaning jumping from the 100th spot to the 90th spot is only marginally easier than making the leap from #30 to #20. In contrast, iOS app rankings become increasingly volatile the higher an app is ranked.

Volatile ratings and rankings can be both a blessing and a burden. On one hand, they allow new apps to dethrone their traditionally high-ranking competitors within a matter of weeks. On the other, the stickiness of the top charts in the Play Store means high-rankings developers can achieve lower customer acquisition costs by relying on customers finding them organically via app store searches.

RECOMMENDED READING:“The Data Behind Why Google’s Play Is So Much Harder

For Startups To Crack Than The IOS App Store.”

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE APP STORE & THE PLAY STORE

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Aside from the ranking algorithm, there are several differences between the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store that mobile marketers should take note of. When it comes to optimizing around ratings and rankings, we’ve singled out these two key differences:

The Play Store offers app publishers the autonomy to make changes to their app’s description and listing at will. Android developers can swap out description screen-shots and videos, tweak the text of their app’s meta data and call to action, and try out new keywords to compete on for app search.

Of course, iOS developers can do all of these same things – but, any changes made to theirapp’s landing page must be approved by Apple (a process that can take up to a week). While some adjustments to the iOS app’s description can be made without filing an official review for a new app submission, any changes to the app’s title, keyword, icon, or screenshots will constitute a new app version – and with that, a ratings reset.

The Google Play Store places less emphasis on the role of ratings and reviews as social proof by showing app downloads as an alternative indicator of popularity. With no other measure of qual-ity available, competing on ratings becomes much more important for iOS apps as a new or less-er-known app can usurp a much more popular app on ratings alone.

SEE ALSO SECTION 6: BEYOND THE STARS for other differences between the App Store and the Play Store when it comes to app store optimization and mobile marketing

But...The Play Store Offers More Freedom to Marketers.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE APP STORE & THE PLAY STORE

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Improving Ratings with Intelligent

Prompts

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What is a Ratings Prompt?

Simply put, a ratings prompt is a proactive in-appmessage that asks people to rate your app.

Ratings prompts typically look like the screenshot on the right and provide three response options:

RATE THE APP. Selecting this option will launch the app store, allowing people to sign in and leave a rating or review.

REMIND ME LATER. Choosing this option will dismiss the prompt for the time being and display it again at a later time. People who click this option are typically open to supporting your app with a rating or a review but are too pressed for time to do so in their current session.

NO THANKS. Selecting this option will dismiss the prompt and tell the app that you do not want to be seen the prompt again – at least in the near future or until the next update.

And why should I prompt?

Prompting is an effective tool for excelling at two of mobile marketing’s chief KPIs:

Achieving a higher volume of ratings and reviews. As shown in the case study at the end of this section, effective prompting can dramatically increase your ratings.

Achieving a higher concentration of positive reviews and 5-star ratings. Prompting a random sample of people using your app to leave a rating is a sure way to get a more representative sample and reduce the negative bias, cutting the percentage of people who are more likely to rate your app after a negative experience than after a positive one from 56% to 19%.

IMPROVING RATINGS WITH INTELLIGENT PROMPTS

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What Makes a Prompt Intelligent?

An intelligent ratings prompt is one that maximizes the volume and sentiment of new ratings and reviews. This is achieved by optimizing how, when, where, and whom you prompt.

Optimizing How You Prompt.

It may be tempting to jump straight in and ask for a rating, but think about it from the customer’s perspective. You’re asking them for a favor before you even know they like your app. As a result, your prompt may be seen as intrusive or even irritating.

Instead, intelligent prompting starts with a simple qualifying question. At Apptentive, we start by asking a single qualifying question: “Do you love this app?”

If the person responds, “Yes,” they will then be shown a thank you message and asked to rate or review the app. If the person responds “No,” they will be shown a feedback prompt or an in-app survey where they can communicate any issues they have with the app.

The result looks a little something like this:

IMPROVING RATINGS WITH INTELLIGENT PROMPTS

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Pathing the ratings prompt in this way achieves three outcomes:

Qualifies that only those who like the app will be asked to leave a rating or review, thereby increasing your average star rating.

Ensures that those who do not like the app are ‘given a voice’ and can leave helpful feedback for the app’s developers, reducing the likelihood of that person leaving a (likely negative) app store review as a last resort means of communicating with the development or customer support team.

Provides a more holistic measurement of customer satisfaction in a manner that only takes a second and sees virtually no opt-out, as opposed to jumping straight into the more time-consuming process of leaving a rating or review.

In working with hundreds of large enterprise apps, we’ve seen that starting a conversation about whether or not the customer is happy with their experience is 5 to 10 times more effective than just asking them to rate the app.

Likewise, we’ve tested asking for a rating against asking for a five-star rating. The result? Asking specifically for five- star ratings can be seen as presumptuous and actually lead to fewer ratings, and a lower average rating. In fact, rating prompts perceived as irritating or presumptuous have even led to rating boycotts where people have left 1-star ratings just to ‘get back’ at the app’s maker.

This may seem like a matter of semantics, but the way your frame your request can dramatically change how your customers perceive it – and the way your customers spread that message and talk about your app.

Your prompts need to be carefully designed with your audience in mind and tested for little nuances that can make a big difference.

Optimizing When You Prompt.

When and how often do you want to ask for a rating? Should you deliver that ratings prompt for each version of the app the customer experiences, at consistent time intervals, or just once throughout the customer lifecycle?

As a matter of best practice, we suggest using a rating prompt once per customer so as to avoid unnecessary interruptions or soliciting a rating from someone who has already rated your app.

IMPROVING RATINGS WITH INTELLIGENT PROMPTS

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32IMPROVING RATINGS WITH INTELLIGENT PROMPTS

Using the Apptentive dashboard, setting this time and frequency criteria is a simple matter. App publishers can effortlessly identify not only what events trigger the dialog, but also how many times each customer will be prompted and how that varies by version number and time since last prompted:

Optimizing Where You Prompt.

Now it’s time to figure out where to place your ratings prompt. A good starting place is identifying key moments of engagement (moments of success or completion) within the app.

Moments of engagement are milestone steps in the customer’s journey after the customer has completed an action – such as making a purchase, sharing an article, or watching a video. By choosing the right moment to display your ratings prompt, you can better ensure that (a) your request will not be seen as intrusive (e.g.,: by knowing not to interrupt the customer when she’s in the middle of watching a video or playing a game), and (b) that your prompt is only being shown to those who have enough knowledge of the app to leave a rating.

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Optimizing Whom You Prompt.

Last but not least, identify which segment of the people using your app you want to receive ratings from. Do you want to maximize rating quantity by asking everyone or focus on rating sentiment by asking your most loyal customers? For best results, we’d suggest targeting only those who have sufficient knowledge of your app through extended use (say, those who have launched your app at least three times or who have used your app for at least five days).

With the power of modern analytics, marketers can define their intended audience as narrowly as desired to deliver that perfect message to the perfect person. For example, if our intended audi-ence consists of English-speaking mobile customers in the United States using an Android device upgraded to 5.0 Lollipop who have opened the current version of the app three times and have not been shown a survey prompt in the last 30 days, we can create audience segmentation rules in a matter of seconds, as seen below in the Apptentive dashboard:

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A Few Best Practices

And finally, a few quick rules of thumb for all intelligent rating prompts:

Never solicit a rating/review at the moment of launch. Your customer launched the app for a specific purpose – let them achieve their goal before making an ask.

Not only is it bad etiquette, but delivering your ratings prompt upon launch results in 50% more app exits than asking for ratings at any other point along the customer’s journey.

Deliver messages at the moment a customer completes a specific task, rather than at the be-ginning or in the middle of the task. For example, don’t interrupt or distract the customer from whatever he or she is doing.

Tie the content to the context. This one should be a no-brainer by this point, but ensure that your message makes sense at the time it is prompted.

The customers you message should be at a place in their experience with your app that they have sufficient knowledge to write a review. Waiting until your customer has completed a specific action in the app will boost your likelihood of getting a rating or a review.

Have empathy for your customers. Don’t annoy people with repeated requests in a short period of time – especially if they have responded “No Thanks” to a ratings prompt.

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A Better Way to Communicate A Note From Our CEO:

Not all in-app messaging is created equal. In fact, much of it is downright annoying, obnoxious, and even obtrusive. Would you appreciate being asked to rate an app 30 seconds into using it for the first time? Or being asked to scroll through a 25-question survey in-app? I doubt it.

AT APPTENTIVE, WE BELIEVE THERE IS A BETTER WAY.

We know that it’s possible to communicate with your appcustomers at the right time, right place, via the right medium, to the right person, with the right message in order to deliver an extraordinary mobile customer experience.

After working with thousands of apps, including those of over 100 leading enterprises, and powering millions of customer conversations every month, we’ve learned a lot. Here are some highlights:

Just asking people to rate the app is ~5 to 10x less effective than starting a conversation about whether or not the consumer is happy.

The actual words used in the message to the customer can dramatically change the percentage of ecstatic customers who talk about your app in the app store and impact the percentage of ratings that also result in reviews.

Showing a ratings prompt on launch is 50% more likely to result in the app being closed than if it’s shown at any other point in the app.

Customers who are asked about their opinion with an app who are unhappy are >100% more likely to return to the app than the average app customer. It turns out that being informed that the company actually cares about your opinion can change the dynamic.

When you give people choices about what action to take, only about 20 to 30% of customers will actually exit the app to do something else.

We’re betting on the fact that you, and app publishers everywhere, want to treat your customers well and with respect.

IMPROVING RATINGS WITH INTELLIGENT PROMPTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robi Ganguly is the CEO and co-founder of Apptentive. He’s on a mission to find a

better way for companies to engage their customers – one that builds advocacy, breaks

through the noise, and extends the customer experience. It’s on this principle of “Customer

Love” that Apptentive was founded.

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IT’S TIME WE ALL GOT BETTER AT TALKING WITH OUR CUSTOMERS

Poorly implemented ratings prompts raised awareness around how easily a mobile experience can be ruined. It’s time to re-examine all of our customer interactions and ask ourselves what we can do better. Are there better places in the app to ask for feedback? Are there places where customers might need help and appreciate a company reaching out? It all comes down to one of our core philosophies, it’s about #PeopleNotUsers. If you focus on having a conversation with your customers in app, the customer experience will be elevated ten-fold. If you listen to your customers, they will respond by helping you with your product roadmap, alerting you of bugs and thanking you by leaving positive reviews in the app store.

Let’s humanize the in-app experience, and together we’ll all win. #CustomerLove.

Robi GangulyCEO & Co-Founder, Apptentive

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Case Study: Urbanspoon

How have intelligent rating prompts led a leading Food & Drink app to see a 1000% increase in ratings?

Satisfied customers rarely take the time to rate apps. All too often it is only the unhappy customers that share their negative experiences, leaving a skewed impression of most apps in the app store for potential customers.

In an effort to improve ratings and create a more balanced story in the app store, Urbanspoon tried building their own in-app rating prompts to help guide their happy and loyal customers to the app store. The results were less than desired. In their search for alternatives, Urbanspoon found a match in Apptentive.

Apptentive’s intelligent rating prompts provided Urbanspoon with the perfect solution. The prompts powered by Apptentive were able to target Urbanspoon customers at the right time and gauge what customers thought about the app before asking for a review. These dynamic prompts helped Urbanspoon connect with their happy customers at the correct time to boost both their ratings and their reviews.

Before integrating with Apptentive in March of 2012, Urbanspoon was at a lifetime average of 3.5 stars and a current average of 4 stars. After the Apptentive integration, Urbanspoon’s star rating has been 5 stars for the past four versions. They now receive over 11x the number of daily ratings and reviews than they did previously and consistently rank in the Top 10 for the Food & Drink category.

KEY METRICS:

5 StarsIn the App Store

1000%Increase in Ratings

& Reviews

7000+Pieces of

Customer feedback.

IMPROVING RATINGS WITH INTELLIGENT PROMPTS

Urbanspoon is the world’s leading provider of time-critical dining data, powering restaurant information and recommendation services that operate in 5+ countries. The Urbanspoon mobile app reaches over 200,000 people every day.

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Improving Reviews by Giving

Customers a Voice

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39IMPROVING REVIEWS BY GIVING CUSTOMERS A VOICE

Driving 5-Star Reviews by Giving Customers a Voice

As noted earlier, there are five main motives for leaving a review in the app store:

To express delight for a positive experience with the app;To express disappointment for a negative experience with the app;To report a bug or crash in the app;To suggest a new feature for the app; and,To comment on a version difference after updating to a newer version of the app.

In an ideal world, only the first and last of these five drivers would result in a review.

Encouraging reviews after positive customer experiences is a surefire way to boost your average rating. iOS developers and marketers carry the additional burden of an average star rating that resets after each new update – making it necessary to encourage a high volume of positive reviews any time they make a change to the app.

The other three drivers – negative experiences, bug reports, and customer wish lists – are better dealt with out of the app stores and the public-facing reviews. These three should fall under the domain of internal communications, where they can be handled personally and privately.

But… if the app stores aren’t the best forums for addressing these issues, why are so many reviews related to these three topics? Because most apps leave their customers no other option.

In the retail world, upset customers can speak to staff or managers on the spot. In the online world, customers can use live chat to speak with a representative or file a ticket. In either scenario, customer complaints rarely make their way to a public forum because the customers are given more effective ways to voice those complaints.

In the world of apps, most customers simply aren’t given a voice.

Customers don’t want to leave the app, launch the app store, navigate to the app’s landing page, and write a review. This is extremely time-consuming and generally seen as ineffective when it comes to getting a response.

For this reason, only 1 in 27 customers will put in the effort to voice their complaints. The majority of the remaining equally-unhappy-but-silent 26 customers will simply leave the app and never return.

Pening up a direct line of communication in app not only reduces the likelihood of unhappy customers venting to the app store but gives you the opportunity to give a voice to the silent majority of your mobile customers – thereby identifying customer pain points, answering their questions, and building customer loyalty and love.

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Channels for In-App Customer Communication

Fortunately, mobile app developers have several choices when it comes to providing a channel for customer communication and support. Among these, the most effective are:

IN-APP MESSAGING (MESSAGE CENTERS).Allowing for two-way dialog between the mobile customers and the app developers or customer success team, in-app messaging is one of the most powerful ways to engage your mobile audience. In-app messaging can be used to address customer questions, confusion, or bug reports, either in real-time or in the form of a delayed response. Customers voicing their issues in such a manner know that their feedback is welcome and will be heard, while the app publishers is given the opportunity to address the issues before the customer feels the need to resort to leaving a public app store review.

Learn more about in-app customer communication and its role in creating meaningful customer relationships on the Apptentive blog.

IN-APP SURVEYS.Mobile optimized surveys are a great way to get a more representative diagnosis of the customer experience, given their high response rates when compared to app store reviews or online surveys. With in-app surveys, you can obtain both quantitative data (e.g., market research) and qualitative data (e.g., feature requests), identify customer pain points, and test the demand for proposed features.

Learn more about integrating and designing effective in-app surveys with The Apptentive Guide to Mobile Research & In-App Surveys.

CONTEXTUALLY-RELEVANT MESSAGING.Context marketing is about delivering the right message, to the right person, via the right medium, at the right place and at the right time. With context marketing, mobile marketers can better connect with customers by connecting analytics, customer insights, and content to create a truly personalized customer experience. In doing so, they can segment their fans and their critics and message each group differently – encouraging fans to leave a review while identifying ways to turn the critics into advocates.

If you’re asking for reviews, both how and when you ask matter:

We’ve found that both timing and prompting play a big role in review likelihood with 60% of reviews occurring within one week of downloading the app and 57% of reviews occurring after being prompted with an in-app ratings prompt.

Learn more about contextual messaging with The Apptentive Guide to Mastering the Five Pillars of Context Marketing

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Managing Negative Reviews

Comments provide great feedback about your app.

Positive comments tell you what people like about your app and what you are doing right. They make you feel good about your work and offer encouragement to keep going. At their best, they are both inspiring and validating: giving other potential customers in the app store a reason to buy or download your app.

Negative comments, however, are a different story. They make you second-guess yourself, and your app, and can give you a biased representation of quality. The reality is this: you will get negative reviews and feedback.

10 SUGGESTIONS FOR DEALING WITH THE INEVITABLE COMPLAINTS:

VIEW ALL FEEDBACK AS AN INDICATION OF CAREIt’s important to recognize that a customer who chooses to engage with you is a rare gift, because they care enough to invest time in sharing their opinion. The vast majority of customers come and go without saying a word to you – having enough passion to engage is a sign of someone who cares about your app in some way.

When you view all feedback, regardless of disposition, as a statement of care, embracing the feedback as an opportunity becomes much easier. Look at negative feedback with respect and amazement – how often do you take the time in your daily life to reach out and tell businesses about how they’ve made a mistake? For most people, the answer is, “not often at all; it’d take too much time.”

Your app customers are the same way – the ones who take the time to complain are special.

AVOID BEING DEFENSIVEA natural tendency for all of us when we get criticized is to get defensive. When you’re defensive, you stake out a position to defend instead of truly embracing the customer’s point of view. In the world of customer service, this is a disaster – being on the opposite side of an issue with your customer results in antagonistic relationships rather than cooperative and collaborative ones. Observe your own reactions and emotions in order to tamp down any natural defensiveness that arises.

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APOLOGIZEIn your daily life, have you ever found yourself worked up and ready to argue with someone and then, upon hearing the words “I’m sorry” felt a massive sense of relief and decompression?

Apologizing goes a LONG way with most people. It reminds them that you’re another human being and that you care about their feelings. When a customer is upset and frustrated, leading off with a sincere apology does wonders for turning a potential argument into a conversation.

MAKE IT RIGHTSometimes an apology simply isn’t enough. Taking the time to go the extra mile and take care of your customer in a way that resolves their issue or delivers them unexpected value is usually well worth the cost to you and your company.

For example, if your app has in-app purchases and someone is complaining, offering them free credits might cost you a bit, but it’s a simple and straightforward way to put meaning and commitment behind your words. We see app developers routinely gift virtual currency to frustrated customers, resulting in increases in retention and spend from the unhappy customer over the long run. Taking the stance that you’ll fix problems and make customers feel special pays dividends over the long run as they tell their friends about your approach and generosity.

HEAR THEM OUTIn communication, the most important skill has nothing to do with what you’re saying. The most important skill is listening.

Remembering this fact when a customer brings negative comments your way will ground you in the importance of truly listening and understanding why they’re upset. Let your customers vent and express their feelings and concerns to you. You might be surprised about what you learn as a result of truly listening and asking questions in order to deepen your understanding. Sometimes problems external to your app (iOS beta releases anyone?) are impacting your customer’s experience. You might find that a problem you’re completely unaware of is impacting the user experience.

Hearing a customer out doesn’t mean that you have to give in and accept their negativity, it means seeking a better understanding of where they’re coming from and how you can be on the same page.

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ACKNOWLEDGEOne of the most powerful ways to deal with negative feelings and feedback is simply to acknowledge the validity of the customer’s feelings in the first place. By first communicating that the person who’s upset is valid in feeling upset, you can diffuse the tension that many people bring to a frustrating situation created by feeling like they need to fight to be heard.

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SET THE RECORD STRAIGHTWhile you certainly don’t want to get into a comment war with an unsatisfied customer, you don’t have to subject your company, your product or yourself to negative comments that are downright false.

If you run across comments that are not accurate, address them while giving the commenter the benefit of the doubt. Assume they didn’t know any better. Take this opportunity to educate them, and the rest of your community.Once you resolve an issue, you should take the opportunity to let your community know that things are all copasetic as well. To earn and foster Customer Love, let your customers know that they have a voice and that you are listening with a simple comment like this:

I am glad we had the opportunity to fix this for you, please let us know if there is anything else we can do to make your experience with us a pleasurable one!

LEARN FROM ITTake what your customers are saying and see how you can incorporate the feedback to create a better product. If it is features they want, work with to evaluate and add them. If the app is buggy, sort out your bugs.

Developing a great app is a journey and every piece of feedback, negative or otherwise, presents you with information that can be used to better your app. Embrace this opportunity to keep your community involved in the process of making something great. Making your customers feel as if they have some ownership in your app is a fantastic way to build your fan base and turn frustrated consumers into evangelists.

TAKE THE CONVERSATION PRIVATE!Public discourse with customers is often a poor way to handle complaints and problems. It lends itself to more black and white statements, a lack of empathy and speaking for an assumed audience. We highly recommend taking conversations private, which is one of the reasons why our in-app feedback tools are built to create 1:1 conversations with your app customers. Private in-app feedback is an exceptional tool to increasing the level of conversation you have with your frustrated customers.

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AVOID THE TROLLSSometimes, negative comments simply come from people who enjoy creating a stir when they can remain anonymous. They love the attention they get from causing controversy.This type of feedback is exceptionally dangerous because it can draw you into an argument that undermines your credibility. It adds no value to your product or community. While ignoring trolls isn’t always an option, if you’re going to engage with an obvious troll, don’t let them draw you into their level of discussion. Be polite, be nice and draw the line on how much time you’ll spend with trolls.

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BEYOND THE STARS:

Optimizing forthe App Stores

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App Store Optimization

& Some Other Tools For the Savvy Mobile Marketer

Ratings and reviews aside, there are a few more tools in the mobile marketer’s toolkit for driving apps to rank more prominently in the app store. Over the next few pages, we’ll explore three such tools: App Store Optimization, Mobile SEO, and In-App Deeplinking.

Just as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s visibility in a search engine results page, App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of improving the visibility of a mobile app within an app store. ASO drives your mobile app to a more prominent position in an app store’s mobile search results, prompting easier discovery and increased traffic in a crowded market place.

And while it’s still a relatively new concept, with the term becoming standardized in 2012, ASO takes many of its best practices from its older brother, applying many of the tips and tricks from your SEO toolkit to the app marketplace.

Like SEO, App Store Optimization starts with an understanding of your target audience – who they are and what they’re looking for in an app. Once you have this basic customer intelligence, you can begin to grasp what sort of language best resonates with your customer base and what keywords will be top-of-mind in their search for an app like yours.

Unlike SEO, you have a very limited number of keywords to target. When it comes to optimizing an iPhone app, you’re restricted to 100 characters of keyword tags and the name of your app. For an Android app, it comes down to the app’s name and description. As such, picking the right keywords is essential and requires a high degree of customer and competitive intelligence.

App Store Optimization is a highly recommended strategy for an app on any platform (iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, etc.). For the sake of simplicity, however, we’ll focus on iPhone and Android apps and their corresponding app stores, the Apple App Store and Android’s Google Play. Over the next few pages, this guide will go over why ASO is becoming increasingly necessary for mobile publishers, where it’s headed, and a few tips from your existing SEO repertoire that can be used to increase your app’s discovery and downloads.

BEYOND THE STARS: OPTIMIZING FOR THE APP STORES

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Putting ASO Into Action

So just how do you go about optimizing for better discoverability in an app store? We’ve put together a list of our ten favorite ASO tricks, many of which have their roots in well-known SEO strategies. UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMER & YOUR COMPETITION

What language do your customers naturally use? How would they define your app? What are their top reasons for downloading and using your app?

What language do your competitors use? Should you go head-to-head with your keywords or target a different set of customers with keywords that better speak to your unique offering and points of differentiation?

If you’re just starting out and don’t have all the answers, there are out-of-the-box solutions like Apptentive that provide customer insights indispensable in the process of creating the framework around your ASO strategy.

It’s equally important to survey your competition to identify which keywords are being targeted by apps similar to yours. You can then determine whether or not it makes sense to target these same keywords or a separate set of keywords unique to your individual value proposition.

Similarly, you’ll have to decide if it makes more sense to rank in the top 10 for a few highly competitive keywords or to rank in the top spot for keywords with a lesser search volume.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT APP NAME

Coming up with a unique name for your app isn’t just a matter of branding. For best results with ASO, include relevant keywords within your title as this text heavily factors in to app store search results.

But keyword inclusion helps with more than just discoverability. Our friends at MobileDevHQ did a study of the top 25 ranking positions and found that apps with a relevant keyword in their title ranked, on average, 10.3% higher than apps without a title keyword.

Are Keywords in the Title Worth It?

Source: MOBILE DEV HQ

Keyword in TitleNo Keyword in Title

Ave

rage

Ran

kin

g 10.3% Ranking Increase

BEYOND THE STARS: OPTIMIZING FOR THE APP STORES

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Titles in the App Store can be up to 255 characters, allowing for plenty of keywords or keyword phrases. However, don’t take this as an opportunity to stuff every keyword you can think of as your app’s name is, first and foremost, your first impression to a potential mobile customer.

You’ll also want to shift your most descriptive text to the front of the title, as only the first 25 or so characters will appear in search results.

Many apps take the approach of Urbanspoon, where they first give their app a brand-friendly name followed by a short, but keyword-heavy description of the app:

Title keywords are less common in the Google Play Store, where titles are restricted to 30 charac-ters, although many apps still try to fit in one or two.

It’s also important to use only URL-friendly characters in your title, particularly in the iTunes App Store. Special characters or symbols will detract from your ASO strategy and cause iTunes to refer to your app’s numeric ID, rather than its name, to scan for relevant keywords.

MAXIMIZE YOUR KEYWORDS

While many of these strategies apply across the board when it comes to the different app stores, the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store have two very different approaches when it comes to ASO keywords.

The iTunes App Store has a 100-character keyword field and exclusively uses your app’s title and whatever keywords or keyword phrases you include in these 100 characters to determine which search strings your app will show up for. With this in mind, it’s important to use all of the allotted characters and carefully research your keywords to maximize your organic traffic. For best results, consider using less competitive keywords for which you can rank high and avoid including your app’s name as a keyword as is already indexed.

On the other hand, the Google Play Store takes an approach more similar to modern SEO. Google does away with the specified tags and scans your app’s description to extract relevant keywords. In this scenario, you’re given 4,000 characters to describe your app in natural, customer-facing language. Without trying to jam as many keywords into this text as possible at the expense of your messaging strategy, try to sprinkle relevant keywords where they logically make sense. Best practice holds that keywords you really want to be targeted should be repeated five times throughout the description. Additional mentions have little to no effect on ASO and turn off potential customers if your description appears intentionally repetitive.

BEYOND THE STARS: OPTIMIZING FOR THE APP STORES

Source: Apple App Store

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CREATE A COMPELLING DESCRIPTION

With the exception of a few of the aforementioned, strategically placed keywords, your app’s description should be targeted toward your customer base, rather than a search engine index. Your description should be viewed as a call-to-action for potential customers. Describe what your app does in simple and concise language, list the unique benefits your app offers, and compel the reader to download your app. You’ve already convinced the app store that your app is relevant to a specific list of keywords, and now it’s time to convince your potential customers that your app meets their needs.

We’d recommend focusing the bulk of your energy on the first three lines of your description to immediately grab your readers’ attention. Given the ever-growing number of apps in the marketplace, customers are sure to have a few – if not several – alternatives to consider when evaluating your app. Make their decision easy by immediately communicating what your app does and why they should use it.

In the remainder of the description, consider including social proof, such as excerpts from reviews of your app or awards your app or company has won, and a list of the unique features (and derived benefits) your app offers.

STAND OUT WITH A UNIQUE ICON

As your potential customers browse a nearly endless list of apps, your visual icon is the first impression they’ll have of your app. And it’s important to make it count.

Stand out from the clutter with an icon unique to your app. Icons should be clear enough that they immediately convey what your app does, even in its scaled-down form within your apps menu. As such, don’t overcomplicate your icon with unnecessary words or logos that demand extra time from your customers.

To get an idea of what works historically, simply browse the top rated apps in your category or Google/Apple’s top picks:

Source: Google Play Store

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Across the board, you’ll see a trend toward bright colors, unique shapes, and simple imagery. Few icons use words and several incorporate some sort of border or drop shadow to make your icon pop, regardless of its background.

And once again, it’s important to do a little competitive research to ensure that your icon is differentiated enough to avoid having your app confused with a competitor’s. INCLUDE SCREENSHOTS & PREVIEWS

Like icons, screenshots in your app’s description may not have a direct effect on search rankings, but they do drive downloads. Images convey more about what your app actually is and bring your descriptive text to life, allowing potential customers to visualize using your app before they make the download.

Typically, your first 2-3 screenshots will show in the gallery on page load, so take special care in ensuring that these screenshots speak to your biggest customer benefits and don’t fall into the trap of showing off a generic splash screen – no matter how nice it looks.

LOCALIZE YOUR APP LISTING

When it comes to global marketing, a “one size fits all” approach won’t cut it. If your audience goes beyond the English-speaking world, invest in translation services to localize your app’s title, keywords, and description to the most popular languages spoken by your customer demographic.

Both the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store allow you to localize your app’s listing to make both discoverability and readability easier for your customers. And it works – taking just a couple minutes to localize keywords has been seen to increase downloads by as much as 767 percent!

According to OneSky, only 31 percent of global app revenue is generated by North America and 72 percent of consumers prefer to use their native language when shopping, even if they’re fluent in English.

INCREASE TRAFFIC WITH OUTSIDE PROMOTION

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that on-page optimization is just one tool in your mobile marketing toolkit. And this is where your SEO knowledge really comes in.

Apple recently revealed that their iTunes search algorithm factors in your app’s total page visits when determining your search rankings. Simply put, the more traffic you drive to your app’s listing, the higher it will score in the iTunes App Store’s search algorithm. To drive traffic, build an online presence around your app with social media and content, soliciting press and reviews, and investing in online advertising.

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Regardless of whether or not other app stores take a similar approach in its search algorithm, moving beyond the app store with your marketing strategy is an important way to drive traffic and downloads for any app.

UPDATE FREQUENTLY

Mobile customers are looking for apps that are constantly improving, with regular updates based on customer feedback. Apps that are frequently updated are seen, by both the app store and the customer, to be of a higher value and more customer-centric. Additionally, app updates highly correspond to better reviews as each new and improved version of the app should naturally receive higher ratings than the version before.

When updating, it’s also important to maximize the “What’s New” field to outline new or improved features and include a compelling call to action for updating the app.

ENCOURAGE FEEDBACK

Last but certainly not least, a consistent flow of positive reviews serves as the highest possible validation of your app’s quality.

The apps with the highest review counts are those that keep their customers engaged and proactively solicit customer feedback to shape their product roadmap and future updates. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that app store ratings provide just a myopic view of customer satisfaction. Typically only your vocal minority – those who either love or hate your app – will take the time to write a review. In reality, most of your customers lie somewhere in-between these two extremes and require that extra engagement or prompt to give their feedback.

As an ever-increasing number of brands and startups are going mobile first, differentiation in the app store is crucial. Apps that hope to make it big need to put just as much thought into their marketing, acquisition, and engagement strategies as they do in their development. And those that do will be rewarded in spades – in the form of more downloads, higher reviews, and Customer Love.

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ARE MOBILE SEO AND IN-APP DEEPLINKSTHE FUTURE OF MOBILE MARKETING?

With over 300 new apps launching every day, it’s getting a bit crowded in the app stores. By the end of 2015, Google Play and the iOS App Store will together contain more than 3 million apps, all begging for the attention and time of smartphone users. How do app publishers keep their users engaged in this rapidly expanding market?

Trends In Mobile MarketingGuest column by Reinder de Vries

DEEPLINKS: IT’S THE HYPERLINK REVISITED

Deeplinks are for apps what hyperlinks are for the internet. Technically, the internet is just a big pile of web pages interconnectedvia hyperlinks. One page links to the next, often in a contextual way. Thanks to search engines, we can find what we’re looking for by making use of web page meta data. A search engine categorizes the web and gives us relevant results, based on previous searches and collective data.

For apps, such a thing doesn’t really exist yet. The app stores are just flat long lists, broadly categorized into “Games”, “Productivity”, “Health”, etcetera. An app publisher’s only means of attracting attention within the app stores is to get featured, or to fight its way to a Top 10 or Top 100 position. Many publishers simply don’t have the means to get there and fade away into app store oblivion.

App deeplinks can change all that. Deeplinks look like normal URLs, but instead of linking to a web page they link to a resource within an app. Such a resource can be anything: a user profile, an article, a shop item, and so on. One app, or a web page, can link to another app, as long as it’s installed on the device.

DISCOVERY: PINTEREST, TWITTER AND FACEBOOK

A great solution for app publishers to make their apps more discoverable, is to add it to their respective pages on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. Quite recently, Apple joined forces with Pinterest to allow users to install apps directly from within Pinterest with so-called App Pins. Any user can add an app to a board on Pinterest, and combine it with native Pinterest content. That means you can create pins, like recipes for pies, and mix them with a recipe app, for instance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Reinder de Vries is an entrepreneur and app

developer, who believes that there are not enough app

makers in the world. He has developed 50+ apps and his

code is used by millions of users all over the globe. When

he’s not coding, he teaches aspiring developers how

to make their own apps at LearnAppMaking.com.

BEYOND THE STARS: OPTIMIZING FOR THE APP STORES

52

Similarly, a publisher can create a Twitter App Card and introduce an app native to an already happening Twitter conversation. In the same way, Facebook allows advertisers to push their apps directly from a Facebook page or ad. It’s a great way to introduce an app in a contextual stream that already exists and is native to the platform, making the barrier to interact with a user to evoke an app install considerably lower.

DEEPLINK OPPORTUNITIES ARE ON THE RISE

Recently, company Deeplink.me launched AppWords (not to be mistaken with, but quite similar to Google AdWords). AppWords is one of the first platforms to directly advertise deeplinked content. Similarly, Branch.io’s platform uses the famous tell-a-friend mechanism to enable User A to recommend deeplinked in-app content to User B, in a frictionless fashion. AppLinks.org takesdeeplinking cross-platform, and integrates with Facebook’s Index API to bundle web content with native app content.

How can you benefit from deeplinking? • Push your apps natively via already existing conversations, such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.• Integrate with relevant services, such as paid deeplink advertising and tell-a-friend referrals.• Connect your in-app content with their web counterpart, so search engines can index and expose it.

Ultimately, don’t focus your effort on getting into a one-size-fits-all app store list. Instead, look for an opportunity to make your content more contextually discoverable.

WILL SEO OVERTAKE ASO?

A recent study shows that 15% of Google search pages contain deeplinks to Android apps. Google is actively indexing the native content within apps through deeplinks, bringing App Store Optimization (ASO) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) closer together. In the future, there’s going to be a time where a native app experience is indistinguishable from the former internet, all thanks to app deeplinks.

SOURCES:http://blog.similarweb.com/an-amazing-seo-trend-for-android-apps-deep-app-links/https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/

http://www.statista.com/topics/1002/mobile-app-usage/

BEYOND THE STARS: OPTIMIZING FOR THE APP STORES

53FINAL THOUGHTS & CONCLUSION

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

According to Gartner, less than 0.01% of consumer mobile apps are considered profitable. And it’s not hard to see why… mobile marketing is a tricky business.

But it can be made a little less tricky with this simple equation:

Ratings and reviews are the single most important indicator of your app’s quality, yet they’re all too often biased by a misrepresentation of your most vocal critics. With a few easy-to-integrate improvements, in the form of rating prompts and in-app customer communication tools, you can make your ratings and reviews work for you rather than against you.

AND ALL IT TAKES IS THREE STEPS:

Give a voice to the silent majority by encouraging ratings and feedback with proactive prompting.

Create more appreciate channels than the app store for providing in-app customer support to filter minor bug reports, feature requests, and customer questions out of your otherwise-positive reviews.

Manage and respond to negative reviews to reduce customer churn and turn critics into evangelists.

We hope you find this guide helpful as you navigate the app stores, and we wish you all the best in your mobile marketing endeavors. Give us a call if we can be of help.

Best wishes,

Team Apptentive

More Star Ratings More Glowing Reviews Better Rankings

Success

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TL & DR

Not enough time in the day to read a 60-page guide? It’s okay. We’re not too hurt.

Here are the nuts and bolts:

App store searches are the #1 way people discover new apps.And ratings and reviews are integral to getting your app to rank higher in the app store.

Ratings and reviews are biased.Less than 1% of customers will ever leave a rating or a review – and this number is overrepresented by those who had a negative experience with your app. But there are several things app publishers can introduce (including rating prompts and in-app communication channels) to limit the bias.

A single star can make or break your mobile app.Only 50% of people will even consider a three-star app. Don’t write off traffic and downloads simply because you haven’t optimized for ratings.

A high quantity of high quality reviews is the best way to drive app downloads.It’s important to not only encourage loyal customers to leave a review but to provide alternative channels of communication for issues better dealt with in a personal, private manner.

Ratings and reviews are just one tool in the mobile marketers’ toolbox.App store optimization, mobile SEO, and in-app deeplinks are increasingly powerful vehicles for increasing an app’s ranking and discoverability in the app store.

We’re here to help every step of the way.Apptentive is in the business of earning customer love and loyalty. Try out a free demo today to see how we can increase rankings, ratings, and reviews for your app.

TL & DR

55

CREDITS

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

Written By:

Alex WalzContent Marketing Manager, Apptentive@alexmwalz

Robi GangulyCEO & Co-Founder, Apptentive@rganguly

Designed By:

Josh TuiningaDesign Director, Apptentive@TheMediumStudio

Additional Contributors:

Emily CarrionHead of Marketing, Apptentive@emily_carrion

Rachel HarringtonMarketing Coordinator, Apptentive@rharrington0527

Reinder de VriesFounder, LearnAppMaking.com@reinderdevries

Did you know 60% of apps are deleted within a month of being downloaded?

Customer acquisition is just half the battle. Check out our Guide to Customer Retention for Mobile Apps for tips on keeping your customers.

About Apptentive:

At Apptentive, we’re the experts in mobile customer experience and in-app communication. We help app makers boost ratings, drive downloads, increase loyalty, and earn #CustomerLove.

Thousands of mobile apps including AllRecipes, Concur, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Overstock, Nordstrom, and UrbanSpoon, use our software to communicate with their customers. The company is based in Seattle, Washington.

For more information, visit us at www.apptentive.com