How We Have Improved Our Game’s Ratings With A Smart App Rater

Players, in general, are rarely motivated enough to leave a review for the game, especially a positive one. In most cases, when an app doesn’t have a rater in place, users will go to the store only to bash the product when it crashes often or when it serves too many ads.

Implementing an app rater is the first step to get a higher review velocity, which is considered by many as an important ASO factor. But the review volume isn’t everything – these reviews should also be positive!

Having a low rating on the app stores is a huge blow to conversion rates. Many users won’t even consider installing a game that has a rating of fewer than 4 stars. Because of this, it’s extremely important to work on the rater’s logic to improve the app’s ratings. In this blog post, I’ll share the app growth hack that we’ve used in our game to greatly increase app ratings.

Our ingenious game designer, Piotr Murawski, came up with a model of app rater’s behavior that would target only happy players, learn which triggers don’t work on the current user, and that would not nag the player. All of these conditions would – in theory – result in getting better reviews for our apps. And guess what – it worked like a charm!

These aims were achieved by developing a new app rater’s logic. Old app rater would simply ask the users to review the game after a few sessions. The new behavior has these rules in mind:
1. Frustrated users dismiss raters or give negative reviews
2. Rater shouldn’t be shown too early in the player’s lifetime or too often

Using the rules we were able to define a set of triggers for the app rater. It would be shown only after multiple sessions of successful players. The only way to see the rater is to succeed in a big competition, win a prize in the minigame, or to have a victory streak. Thanks to this approach we’ve made sure that only satisfied and engaged players would be asked for a review.
We’ve also taken in mind that constantly spamming the player with the rater is counter-productive – we’ve determined what time is best to repeat the rating query.

Thanks to these changes our app’s rating started to increase right from the day when we’ve published the update. One simple app growth hack with immediate results!