Breakdown Of Reviews Gives iOS And Android App Publishers A Powerful Review Mining Alternative

If you read our previous post on Review Mining, you know that reading reviews of your app, and competing apps, can be a great way to uncover new ASO keywords, learn how to improve your app and find untapped opportunities in your category. The best part is that this information is free to anyone who has the time to sort through all of the reviews.

But the key word is time. Reading through tens of thousands of reviews and extracting useful information can take hours.

In this post, we will demonstrate how our Breakdown of Reviews feature will save you a ton of time in comparison to using the Apple App Store or Google Play review filtering. Then we will show you the information we provide and how you can use it to improve your app.

The Limitations Of App Store And Google Play Review Mining

App Store

When you are in iTunes, you can only search for reviews from the current version or all versions. You can also choose to see the most helpful, most favorable, most critical or most recent reviews. Even if you use these simple filters, you still have to scroll through a lot of results if you want to get specific information, like reviews from the previous update.

In addition, iTunes will only return reviews from your default App Store country. If you want to see reviews from another country, you have to change your default country and start all over again. This doesn't always work however and there may be some countries that you are not able to get information from.

Google Play

Google Play also only allows you to filter reviews by current version or all versions. You can choose to only see the newest, highest rated or most helpful reviews.

This means that you have to do a lot of scrolling to see the one-star reviews. Many times, the reviews with the worst ratings can provide the best insight into how to improve your app.

It is understandable why Google would want to bury the worst reviews. But this is a disservice to both consumers and app publishers.

We wanted to provide a better way to filter reviews. So we created Breakdown of Reviews for both the Apple App Store and the Google Play App Store.

Breakdown Of Reviews For iOS

Our App Profile Pages now have a Breakdown of Reviews menu item on the left side of the screen. When you select the Country Breakdown tab, you will be able to select the version of the app you want to examine, at the top.

The table below will then compare the reviews for that version against the reviews for all versions, for each App Store country that we have data for.

If you want to find out more about a particular country or reviews across all countries, you can use the All Reviews tab to get more details. This can help you figure out exactly what people love or hate about an app.

When the All Reviews tab is selected at the top, you will be able to filter reviews of the app by:

• Review date (useful for seeing reviews during a particular event or season)

• Rating (select 5, 4, 3, 2, 1-star, or all ratings)

• Version (select all versions or any previous version that we have data for)

• Country (select all countries or a specific country)

We also provide the ability to skip/scroll through the page results on the right side of the header. You can skip to a specific page by typing in the page number and hitting enter or you can read the reviews page-by-page with the arrow buttons.

Unlike the filtering capability in iTunes, our Breakdown of Reviews feature allows you to examine very specific segments the reviews. This will save you a lot of time by only displaying the reviews that you are interested in.

Breakdown Of Reviews For Android

Since the Play Store is structured a little differently than the Apple App Store, we don't provide a review breakdown by country, but by language. This allows you to see which localizations are doing well and where the app can improve.

The Google Play Breakdown of Reviews is similar to the iOS version. You can filter by date, ratings and language. The page counter in the top right corner also allows you skip to a specific page and scroll page-by-page.

Conclusion

Both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store have their own review filtering functions, but they are not practical solutions for app publishers who need to research reviews. The Breakdown of Reviews feature on our App Profile Pages is built for this purpose and will save you a lot of time when you are doing Review Mining.

This feature is currently available to the public. So be sure to check out our iOS and Android App Profile Pages while it is still available. We may choose to make it a paid module at some point, so take advantage of it while you can.

If you need more advanced capabilities like measuring sentiment by keyword, keyword search and more, check our our Review Analysis module.