How to get Five Star Play Store Reviews
How far would you go to get your five-star Play Store reviews?
Step 1: Have a 5 Star Attitude
It all starts with your attitude. Do you really understand your customers? Do you have a great product? What does customer service mean to you? Answering these questions well should automatically boost your stars.
Don’t take shortcuts
Here are some shockingly common examples of nefarious ideas:
“We’ll just ask everyone in the company to rate the app with 5 stars, and ask them to ask their family to do the same.”
“Can’t we ask the user to rate the app and then if they rate it badly, just not send the review?”
“Let's ask only the users who are having a good experience.”
“Let's create hundreds of Gmail accounts, and use them to write fake reviews.”
“Let's pay someone to do the above.”
“Let's pay our users to review the app.”
If you don’t see anything wrong with these ideas, you can stop reading now. Thank you for your time.
Understand the rating system
The rating system on the Play Store is what Google relies on instead of having the strenuous and latent review process that Apple has. In other words, Google crowdsources its review process and it works in a similar way to their search engine. It’s complicated, ever-changing, and you will never beat it.
Getting all the people in your company to rate the app is superficially plausible, unfortunately, surprise surprise, you’re not the first one who thought of that. Apart from the fact that humans can spot fake reviews pretty easily, Google has algorithms that aren’t half bad at it either.
Some sample reviews
“I think this app is just the best!” — Cousin Bob
Bullshit.
“Good. Just what I need.” — Mr Smith
Fake news.
“This app rocks my world, previously I had to memorise the train timetables, now I have them in my hand. It also reminds me when it’s time to leave home. It has a fast and effective interface that doesn’t freeze or crash. You’re saving my life, thanks guys!” — Regular Tom
Better.
“I gave this app three stars initially because it was missing the ability to save my previous trips. After writing the review, I was contacted byt support and told that it would be in the next release… and to my surprise, it was! I changed my review to 5 stars. That’s what I call customer service. I’m yours for life gentlemen!” — Supermans Girlfriend
Winning.
Good reviews tell you why the product (not just the app) is excellent. As you can see, it often it has nothing to do with the app itself. Customer support got back to the customer with detailed information about the upcoming release — a clear indication that this company has their shit together: they noticed the feedback, acknowledged it, made a promise, then delivered. Bravo. They got a five-star review, but that is worthless compared to the fan they just made.
Beating the rating system is simple, deliver a five-star product, get a five-star review.
Talk to the bad reviews
If you want to write an app that has good reviews you have to ask the people who aren’t having a good experience what is wrong and fix it.
Google Play is an out of the box feedback channel, instead of trying to game it, try to use it as it was intended — to better your product.
If you do your job properly, your angriest users can one day write your best reviews. If you listen to them, promise to fix their problem, actually fix their problem, and finally, check in with them to be sure — even the sourest troll will praise you for it.
So principle number one: don’t use devious tricks to try and work the system. Just focus on writing an app that everyone enjoys and feels good about. The reviews will come naturally.
Step 2. The gentle push.
Now that you have your head screwed on properly, you can start to give people the gentle push. By gentle push I mean show them the feedback door, but let them walk through it themselves.
Don’t interrupt
In general, most people will agree that it is a bad idea to ask people to review your app while they on in any kind of mission (a purchase funnel, changing notification preferences, signing up are all examples of ‘missions’). Finding the right time is almost impossible, because it’s easy to make the case that your users are always on a mission. So how do you interrupt them and ask for a review?
Never!
Here are some common places people interrupt and why they are a bad idea:
- After a purchase — what if they want to make another purchase directly? You’ve just literally and purposefully led them away from your app. Is a review worth more than a conversion?
- On launch — asking on launch is not just an interruption of workflow, but can prevent the user from continuing to use your app!
Make it a part of your UI
Put a “Please Review” button into the final screen on your workflow. Put a “Please Review” card into your recycle view randomly. Just like “donate” buttons in Freeware, you’d be surprised how often they are clicked.
A better idea is to do this only after the user has reached a milestone or two — this has two benefits: users will notice something new in the UI if they have had a chance to acclimatise to it and they have had a chance to use the app and will be able to provide richer feedback.
Always provide an opt-out
If you are really going to bother the user with some kind of interruption, at least have the courtesy to include a “don’t ask me again” checkbox. If they say they don’t want to, respect that and …don’t ask them again.
Monitoring how often this checkbox was clicked is what helped me convince product owners to take it out altogether… almost everyone clicks on “Don’t show again”.
Capture user frustration
Asking the user if they need help at the right time is perhaps the algorithm you should spend the most time on. Test your UX and capture users who are making it say 80% of the way through your workflow, then bouncing. Or maybe they have got 20% of the way through making a booking, buying a product five times without buying something. If you can capture these moments, you may prevent a bad review in the making.
Setup a private feedback channel for negative reviews
Again, the Five-Star Attitude is that you want feedback good or bad in order to increase your ratings. It is entirely reasonable, however, to want good feedback to be listed as a review on the Play Store, and you want negative feedback, where possible, funnelled directly to some kind of private support platform so that you can help the user before they make a negative review. You can even put it into your support scripts to ask the freshly-satisfied-customer to make a review on the Play Store.
Respond to negative reviews
If a user does leave a negative review on the Play Store — it’s your fault for not capturing their pain in the app and directing them to your help desk. When someone leaves a bad review, the Android guidelines state that you should always respond at least once publicly, after that try to take it offline ASAP. Having a public argument on the Play Store is never going to end well.
Go forth and create satisfaction.
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