Why Can I Not Cut and Paste My Review in the Google Play Store
The app stores are more than competitive every day and app publishers are looking for more intelligence and organic advantages in order to build a sustainable mobile business. This ways investing in tools like Apptentive for in-app feedback and retentiveness and poring over in-app analytics, attempting to glean important insights that volition unlock some other stride up in growth.
Black Hat App Store activities take aim at App Ratings
Unfortunately, some ambitious app publishers aren't limiting their activities to just white hat organic strategies. Sometimes they take shortcuts in an endeavour to game the top charts. For the by several years, we've noticed that a number of "top" app publishers announced to be paying people to create false reviews, hoping that it'll help them boost their app shop conversion rates and move them up the charts.
Anecdotally, faking reviews and gaming the app stores seems to exist a practice that is getting used more than broadly. Both the Apple tree App Store and Google Play Store have made multiple changes to their ranking algorithms over the past year and some of the most recent shifts have conspicuously increased the importance of app ratings and then the benefit of faking reviews is growing larger.
With the broader credence that ratings and reviews affect an app's ranking, plenty of sites and services have popped up offering reviews for a price. Companies like BuyAppStoreReviews, BestReviewApp, and AppRebates hope reviews to aid y'all climb to the peak of the app stores. Fiverr has thousands of people offering reviews in exchange for $5. We're not going to link to these sites to heave their SEO profile, only if you want to accept a look at them it's clear that at that place's a market for blackness lid, non-organic app store rating action.
Faux reviews aren't limited to the app store, either. People have been doing this for years on Amazon and it's estimated that up to a third of online reviews are imitation. When dealing with ephemeral and digital products, inquiry has consistently shown that consumer ratings and reviews are very impactful on purchase decisions. And so there's a benefit to having ratings and reviews for software, e-books, music and many other products – what can we do to brand sure that they're 18-carat and helpful to the consumers they're supposed to serve?
What do fake reviews look similar?
A rare peak at a purported imitation app review farm. Source: BusinessInsider
While information technology is impossible to always know if reviews were paid or non, there are some very clear examples of apps who have simulated reviews. For example, by looking through reviews on a per reviewer basis, you lot tin spot apps that are all using the same services to larn app reviews and have like reviews from the same grouping of people in the app store. Notice the similarity in brevity and phrasing.
Another way to identify imitation reviews is to wait for review text that is identical – this happens more often than you might think. For example, hither's a sample of reviews taken from the Android app, Global Banking and Finance.com.
What y'all're seeing is that there are a lot of people out there willing to brand multiple accounts on the diverse app stores in guild to re-create and paste their reviews multiple times in order to finish their task. Conspicuously the publishers ownership fake reviews aren't terribly concerned most variety and uniqueness in the creation of these reviews.
False app store reviews aren't express to but positive reviews either – we hear from clients all the time that one of the reasons they love having Apptentive on their side is to combat their competitors who are willing to pay for simulated negative reviews. Similarly to the imitation positive reviews, yous don't accept to expect very hard to observe large numbers of i star reviews that employ the verbal same language to denigrate an app, hoping to drop it in the app store search results and rankings.
In pursuit of a better App Store experience
Hither at Apptentive, because we're obsessed with helping companies meliorate serve their mobile app customers, nosotros've been watching this beliefs unfold and expand and wondered how we could start to combat it. Recently, when we announced our Love Score, we knew that nosotros had an opportunity to showtime creating a ameliorate, more than comprehensive view into what customers truly call back about the apps they use. We wanted to really identify the apps that customers dearest and to summarize the state of the app stores today.
However, nosotros knew we had to business relationship for apps that contain fake reviews – our algorithm was originally easily fooled past the apps that take been paying people to boost their ratings and diminish others. In order to counteract this bad behavior we created a metric we telephone call Reviewer Quality . Past taking a look at the length and word usage of every review in the app store, we're able to create scores for app store reviewers. All the individual scores for the entire reviewer base of a mobile app makes up theR eviewer Quality of the app.
Reviewer Qualityhelps us locate apps that accept a significant proportion of false reviews and minimizes the positive sentiment that has been falsely created also as diminishing the imitation negative sentiment that is sometimes manufactured too. Our reviewer quality analysis helped u.s. detect the examples of fake reviews we've shared above.
Digging further into our data, we realized that the trends we tin identify in our data was fascinating every bit an analysis of the entire app ecosystem. Hither are a few key conclusions we've been able to make:
iOS Apps Take More than Imitation Reviews
Even though many share the annotate lament that "Google Play is full of fake apps and fake reviews" what we've found is that the iTunes app shop is really the leader in fake reviews. Our data reveals that 55% of the apps flagged for containing fake reviews were iOS apps and 45% were Android apps. This might take something to do with the app download volume reward that iOS enjoyed up until the eye of last year. Nonetheless, we also call up that Google Play's requirement of a Google + account could have diminished the imitation review problem a scrap because it requires more of a clear notion of identity.
However, the wort offenders announced to be Android apps. Of the 100 apps with the worst Reviewer Quality scores, 80% of them are Android apps.
Games Contain The Most Fake Reviews
In our list of apps flagged for fake reviews, games represented 41% of the apps with false reviews. The Games category is the most competitive category in both app stores, so information technology'southward non super surprising that games also take the largest portion of the fake reviews.
Writing A Review Is More Work, Except When It'due south Fake
When comparing all of the apps that were flagged for containing fake reviews to the rest of the app ecosystem, the apps containing faux reviews had a higher percentage of ratings with a review written. For the app store as a whole, about 20% of ratings also include a review. However, apps that looked like they had fake reviews had a much higher ratio: on average 35% of ratings for flagged apps contained a review – that's a 75% increase over the app store average!
Prevailing as a White Hat App Marketer
If yous're an app marketer working difficult to become your app noticed, these blackness hat app store tactics tin can be extremely frustrating. To gainsay these tactics there are a number of deportment y'all tin take to protect your mobile app from fake negative reviews and increment your organic reviews to compete with apps that pay for reviews.
1. Be Vigilant!
You tin can help make certain that competitors who pay for negative reviews for your app are wasting their money. Both the Apple App Shop and Google Play accept a process for reporting fraudulent reviews. For Google Play, there is an option next to every review on an applications Play Store folio where you tin mark information technology equally spam. You can also use Google's aid center to study inappropriate activity, including fake reviews (click "Contact United states" in the top right corner).
For the Apple App Store, you should report fake reviews that take been given to your app via iTunes Connect. Under the "Support" tab, you lot tin can find a link to "Contact Us," which leads to a contact class. Choosing the following topics in social club, "App Store Questions," "Customer Reviews," and "Report a Fraud Concern" you are able to easily report any issues you lot have noticed.
Besides looking out for fraudulent activities, reviews are an important source of customer insight, so monitoring them regularly to understand customers' issues is a cadre requirement.
two. Exist Proactive and Apply Your App Evangelists
Reading through every negative review takes time and it isn't always clear whether a review is fake or not. You already accept the ultimate tool that can positively impact your ratings and make any paid fake reviews fifty-fifty more meaningless – your customers!
Be proactive and reach out to your app evangelists. Get the people who beloved your app to tell the world why they love it. Apptentive'southward in-app rating prompts are the perfect tool for connecting with your virtually happy customers and politely request them for a review. A simple question asked at the right time can easily result in a review increase of 300% or more.
3. Don't Wear A Black Hat
Resorting to using black hat app shop tactics may be tempting, only it is non a sustainable or advisable solution for improving your own reviews or lowering a competitor's rating. Over the years in that location have been several updates to both Google Play and the Apple App Store to combat scammers, fake apps, and manipulative tactics to proceeds ratings and reviews.
By refusing to resort to such tactics you are reducing the number of potential fraudulent cases Google and Apple need to handle, making it easier for them to quickly handle any cases that exercise arise. Stopping these practices from ever happening may never be entirely possible, just past following appropriate methods yous are improving the quality of the app store and promoting positive growth in the app developer community.
If you have any ideas on how we tin can further use our data to provide valuable information please share in the comments below. Equally ever, questions and comments are welcome and encouraged.
Source: https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2014/05/27/fake-reviews-google-play-apple-app-store/