In the age of the customer, app ratings and reviews build brand credibility, influence potential users, and impact how your app ranks in search results (ASO factor). Most users check an app's rating and featured reviews before installing the app.
Our Review History and Review Analysis modules provide meaningful insights into user sentiments that allow you to understand your user base, identify issues, and spot potential trends. Dive deeper into user reviews for any app as part of your competitive analysis and examine user feedback to pinpoint recurring issues and ongoing requests. Use these modules with signals from our App Update Timeline and Usage Intelligence modules to understand what users like and develop specific features accordingly.
This guide will walk you through best practices for:
- Evaluating the impact of app updates and other modifications based on user feedback or experience
- Analyzing user sentiments to uncover pain points and drive product improvements
- Tracking Featured reviews and responding to reviews using Sensor Tower
Review History
Reviews and ratings are important for developers and users alike. Our Review History module captures and organizes all user reviews for any app in both stores allowing you to examine user sentiments for any given date, version, star rating, and countries. View iOS app reviews by Country Breakdown and check out reviews by Language Breakdown for Google Play apps.
Positive ratings range from three to five stars, while Negative ratings include anything less than three stars. Use Review History to discover precisely what users across the world are saying about any app. Ratings refer to the star ratings, and Reviews are the written ratings left by users. User reviews for other apps are also an excellent place to find keywords for your ASO since there might be a few overlooked gems.
Use Review History alongside App Update Timeline to better understand user sentiments around app modifications and improvements from recent updates. You can also use the App Update Timeline to track featured reviews for any app to see how their product page ratings have changed over time.
Let's take a look at the Paypal app to understand the impact of a recent version update.
✅ Filter by date range; here we're checking for App Store user reviews between 22nd December 2019 to 20th March 2020.
✅ Narrow down the selection of reviews by All Positive, All Negative, or choose a preferred star rating to examine why users marked a particular rating. Generally, there are mixed versions for this date range, so we'll look at a more recent version.
✅ Export data to CSV and examine alongside other signals from App Update Timeline and Category Rankings.
✅ Check the iOS Country Breakdown and Android Language Breakdown tabs to see overall app ratings alongside selected version ratings.
We notice that there are mainly positive reviews across all the countries; however, there seem to be a lot more negative reviews for version 7.21.1 compared to earlier versions. Some user feedback includes "...frustrations with Customer Service, lack of notifications, and account related activities".
You can also set up Custom Alerts to track and respond to any Negative Reviews. Responding to reviews can be really powerful to increase your ratings, especially replying to featured reviews. By responding to any negative featured reviews, you can improve your storefront page ratings, which can lead to more downloads in the long run.
Export reviews to CSV and dig deeper to identify what features competitors are lacking or even brainstorm ideas from their most requested features to inform your own product developments. Sensor Tower's Review Analysis module examines these all reviews for you to save time and effort.
Review Analysis
Identify valuable feedback by country, rating, and searchable terms using our Review Analysis module. We collect frequently mentioned phrases and use a natural language processor to group terms, so you can cut through the noise and effortlessly analyze sentiments or recurring themes. Use our Export Reviews and Translate features to dig deeper and understand regional needs to start prioritizing problems and product requests.
To view review activity for specific versions, go to App Intelligence and click on Review Analysis under App Profiles.
Select a date range and star rating to examine reviews. Our Official Annotations Timeline provides context and insights into any version updates that led to a spike or dip in overall star ratings. Click on the '+' icon to examine these signals further on the App Update Timeline page.
The key features in this module are the Terms and Tags tabs. It's impossible to track all the various single-phrase terms used in reviews, which can include synonyms, aliases, abbreviations, and plurals. Our Tags feature groups recurring themes under one general word or phrase alongside the number of reviews highlighting these sentiments.
Clicking on any row within the tags tab highlights all the reviews under the generalized phrase. For example, if you want to focus on bugs and improvements, click on the phrase "Bug" to highlight and view all relevant reviews related to bugs or app issues.
Our natural language processor captures similar sentiments and shows all relevant reviews. Tags like "Feature Request" and "Difficult" are great for understanding user sentiments that can drive necessary product updates. The Translate and Track Keywords functionality allows you to find new keywords for your ASO.
We've also aggregated frequently mentioned terms and phrases under the Terms tab along with the number of reviews featuring these phrases. Here you can also discover and track new keywords or search terms users might be using to describe your app function and features. Export Reviews by Terms or Tags to identify frequently mentioned pain points and feedback trends.
In the screenshot above, we can see 24 reviews for terms related to "feel safe" using Paypal over a 30-day timeframe. Feedback like this is very beneficial for potential customers to see and can also provide brainstorming opportunities for future ad/branding campaigns.
Follow up and respond to any negative reviews immediately by setting up Custom Alerts to automatically track any complaints and ensure your users are fully satisfied. Use these alerts with our other signals to understand when to place user feedback requests in your app, especially as reviews don't disappear from their store. While replying to reviews doesn't affect your ASO, it can increase conversion and retention from loyal customers and leads to a higher number of downloads.
Press and Media