how to get great ratings blog post

ratings.md

Getting Great Ratings

Building a great app is hard, and so is building an audience. The exposure you get in the app store is critical, so developers need to make the most of it. Many apps ask their users to leave a review, in hopes of boosting their ranking in the app store. But pitfalls abound.

Recently the creators of Circa, the popular news app, shared some insights on how they achieved a stellar 5-star rating from 90% of the users who chose to leave a review.

There are several techniques that Circa used. We're going to breakdown two of their reccommendations and show how you can use Artisan tools to handle the drudgework, allowing you to implement their strategy quickly and easily.

Asking at the right time

Instead of asking any random user for a rating, smart developers can use analytics to send their request to the people most likely to give great ratings. Frequent users are your biggest fans, and its a good bet that people who use your app everyday will give you the best feedback. Conversely, if a heavy user of your app has negative feedback, you'll want to know about it fast. Circa limited their request to users who "opened the app at least 10 times, over the course of 3 distinct days". Every app is used differently, so you'll need to look at the usage patterns of your user base to determine what the right number is for you. You can use Artisan's behavioral segmentation to find your most loyal users.

Asking the right way

Nobody likes to be interupted while reading a good story or playing an addictive game. The best time to ask for a favor is right after you've delivered the goods. In retail apps, you might wait till a user completed a purchase. Artisan's marketing automation allows you to create campaigns targeted to particular user segments, and triggered off of specific user interactions. Below, we show how to create a campaign that occurs when a user has performed a checkout of their shopping cart.

Ship it! This is a great concise and actionable blog post!

Minor things up for debate:

• I prefer to write out numbers when under 10 so: "We're going to breakdown 2 of their.." -> "We're going to breakdown two of their..." further down where you are quoting Circa I think that's okay as is.
• Another example for when to ask is at the completion of a level (for a game) or if there isn't a clear conversion, then maybe after a person has read 10 articles (for a news app). And maybe add a negative example--never ask on App startup--I hate that!
• It might be good in your example to show how to segment on people who have already rated or to make your campaign so people only see it once.
• Maybe add a tiny example of "But pitfalls abound."