Friday 9 September 2016

The Importance of a Rating Pop Up in your Mobile App

We all know how important it is for our apps to get rated. Ratings help users choose your app over the competition. Ratings also play a big part in the your app rankings (cannot overstate the importance of this point, even a small dip in your ratings can get an app in a crowded space plummeting down). So how important is it to have a pop up that asks a user to rate the app? Based on my experiment, very important. 

So here is what I did. I've always had a pop up, in my app BreakFree, that asks the user to rate my app and takes them to the Google Play Store page of the app. I removed this pop up for a month (29th Jul to 28th Aug) and then re-instated the pop up. Look at the graph below to see to what extent this affected the number of ratings I received per day.




As you can see there is a huge increase in the number of ratings 29th Aug onwards. To put this in numbers, I got 0.97 ratings/day for the time period when I did not have a rating pop up. And from the day I added this back, my ratings/day jumped up to 3.13. Not only this, but the rating itself improved from 3.5 to 4.1. This is because when you don't ask for a rating, only the unsatisfied user will go out of his way to leave a bad comment with a 1 star rating.

So this is a no brainer, your app must always ask the user for a rating. There are numerous ways on when and how to do this. Will reserve that for another post.