How Much Your App Ratings & Reviews Affect Your Conversion Rate

In the Play Store, users have the ability to review and rate all the apps they have downloaded on their devices. We know it helps increasing a conversion rate, but how much?

Users Can Leave From 1 to 5 Stars

Conversion Rate

What we are looking at here is what percentage of the listing viewers are installing the app.

Conversion Rate = # of Installs / # Listing Visitors

It matters a lot since creating traffic to a listing page has a cost — buying traffic or spending time creating it — so getting the most out of it will optimize the budget or the time you invested into it.

Of course, all parts of a listing page can affect the conversion rate: title, app-icon, short description, screenshots, video, feature graphic, etc But there are some elements on a page, like ratings and reviews, that are untestable and difficult to gather data from.

Ratings & Reviews

It is a great way for users to provide feedback to app developers and it also gives an honest indication (not marketed) to new visitors looking for new apps.

Medium’s Android App Ratings

Logically, the better ratings and reviews an app gets the better its conversion rate should be, as it shows the app’s likeliness to bring satisfaction to users.

So, how much?

To get a fair comparison, we have selected a Google Adwords non-branding campaign, ran (and still running) in one country, over the last 3 years (launched before we started increasing our ratings), it helped cut away a lot of noise in the data. Its budget was constant, always limited, and its design was updated constantly to follow our listing page and app branding.

Conversion Rate By App Ratings

Ratings at 3.9, our conversion rate was 36.56%

Ratings at 4.0, our conversion rate was 41.62% (+13.84%)

(+13.84%) Ratings at 4.1, our conversion rate was 44.23% (+6.28%)

(+6.28%) Ratings at 4.2, our conversion rate was 47.85% (+8.18%)

(+8.18%) Ratings at 4.3, our conversion rate was 47.70% (-0,32%)

The strongest gain was made by reaching 4.0

The weakest, a loss even, was by reaching 4.3

Overall, we got a clear increase of our conversion rate, from 36% to 47%, getting a 30.5% growth of our listing performance.