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.

The Relationship Between Downloads and In-app Purchases

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I've been doing a lot of analysis on my apps, especially the popular ones (BreakFree and Fuel Buddy). One of the points I wanted to dive into was the nature of in-app purchases. How are these related to downloads? At what point do people go for in-app purchases? Does an increase in downloads always translate to higher purchases? 

The common theory is that increase your downloads and your purchases will increase. This is true but with a caveat. Let me explain. 

Look at the graph below. The red bars represent downloads and the blue bars are in-app units sold (the actual number was obviously lot lower, it has been multiplied by x to get both the bars in proportion). Now as you can see the downloads increased from Jan to April, and so did the in-app purchases, no surprise here. But look at June, though the downloads fell drastically the purchases actually increased! The fall in the purchases only triggered in July. This can again be seen in August, though the downloads increased, the in-app purchases fell.

From the above findings we can deduce that in-app purchases do follow the download trend, but there is a lag of a month. The plausible explanation could be that the users only purchase after trying out the app for a fair amount of time (on an average one month).

So the next time you see a jump in downloads but not in in-app purchases, don't worry, it will soon follow :-)

Please keep in mind that this study was done on Fuel Buddy, which is a stable, high utility product. The above study may not hold true for games and novelty products.

A Case Study of What Went Wrong With my App

One of my apps, Fuel Buddy, has not been doing well lately. And by doing well, I mean the downloads have been low, and rankings are on a steady decline. To take corrective action I took some desperate measures like adding a new feature, changing screenshots, etc. But there was no improvement. So I decided to analyze thoroughly what the problem could be. I gave myself an entire day to figure out what could be going wrong. What I found was surprising to say the least. The reasons were a combination of multiple points and not just one. I took note of my findings to make sure I don't repeat the mistakes again. Sharing them here.

Fuel Buddy Downloads Case Study

• This one is obvious, but needs to stated as the first point. Rankings and downloads go hand in hand. One affects the other. This one clearly has a spiral effect. The sooner you nip the bud the better.
• A slight drop in ratings over two days plummeted my rankings, which led to a drop in downloads (see point 1). Case in point, my app got an average rating of 2 and 3 on the 6th and 7th of May. This led to a drop in downloads by almost 30%!! Though I have not seen the opposite being true, a spike in ratings leading to a better ranking. None the less, avoid low ratings at all costs.
• Change in the app title can lead to big drop in installs and high uninstalls. This can only be experimented with over a long period, a few months maybe. Eg, I Changed Title to FuelBuddy-Car Service, Mileage, and saw the rate of uninstalls rise. Plausible reason can be that people expected the app to be more of a car service app, whereas it is more on the lines of a mileage logger. Changed the title back to Fuel Buddy - Car Mileage Log and the rate of uninstalls reduced.
• If you see your uninstalls go up, the first thing to do is check your crashes, we tend to ignore this since they don't show up in the Developer Console, but it is a good idea to check them with a analytics software like Google Analytics or Flurry. Make sure to implement these in your app, because most people don't bother clicking the 'Send Report' button, they just uninstall the app.

The one thing I did to desperately get back on track was churn out random solutions in the hope that I fix my app. This was mainly due to the amount of realtime information available to us in the form of downloads, ratings, reviews, in-app purchases, etc. Don't get bogged down by daily data. The truth is that daily fluctuations can be caused by external factors. It all makes sense when you zoom out, and look at the big picture. Study the trend over a week or month. That will give you the real root cause which you can act upon.

Hope these points help you out. I'll be doing another case study of my Facebook Ad campaign on one of my apps. Stay tuned for that.