How to Understand App Feedback Faster

App feedback is as good as gold—a rare look into what your users want, with ideas for how to provide it. And the best part of it is that you don’t have to convene a panel for user research or pay anyone to participate—with a few prompts you could get an avalanche of feedback through app store ratings and reviews at no cost. But with all of this information comes the need to aggregate and make sense of it all. 

Taking a step back for a moment, why is app feedback so helpful? Review data helps address bugs, performance issues, and UX problems faster. With the ability to categorize app feedback into macro and micro views, app publishers can understand reviews and trends in one view, track user sentiment, and ultimately rank higher in the app stores. 

Tracking app feedback automatically also helps save time for your QA team. It allows them to pinpoint bugs faster than using legacy or manual processes. Instead of mining your app looking for nuggets, issues and bugs are easily organized into digestible buckets so you can get your developers working on a fix quickly. 

And recognizing app feedback through developer responses is especially important. With your users taking the time to write reviews, no matter where the feedback falls on the spectrum from positive to negative, they deserve a unique response. In fact, this can lead to upgraded ratings and better relationships with customers. Raul Gutierrez, CEO of app publisher Tinybop explained to Apple that when his users get responses to their reviews, “people feel heard. When you addressed their problem, they can become your biggest advocates.” 

So now we understand why a focus on app feedback can be so helpful, but what factors should app publishers keep in mind to ensure they can process and act on app reviews faster than ever? They can start by breaking down app feedback based on:

Version

All user feedback is not created equally. You need to be able to slice and dice the data to be able to pinpoint which app version reviews are attributed to. With this level of granularity you can introduce a new feature and test how it performed based on quantitative (ratings) and qualitative metrics (reviews). 

Topic

App feedback in aggregate is great, but understanding which topics come up most often can provide crucial information that can impact your product roadmap and beyond. The topics that come up most often point out both the selling points and immediate action-items for your team. 

Impact

Hand in hand with the terms that come up most often in app feedback is the impact they have on your overall app rating. Investigating the terms that have the largest negative impact on your rating could provide the goal your development team tackles in their next sprint to fix it before any more low ratings pull down your overall app store rating. Conversely, the terms that have the largest positive impact on your rating can be handed over to your marketing team to feature in advertising campaigns. There’s nothing quite like happy customers to sell your app for you.

App Feedback Wrap Up

All app publishers want to understand what users think of their app and how to improve over time, but sifting through countless reviews is a time-intensive task that luckily is becoming a thing of the past. App Annie’s Advanced Reviews summarize and categorize your app feedback using Natural Language Processing to help you gain insights and take action faster than ever.  

Get in touch with our Sales Team today to learn how you can get started for free and begin understanding customer needs through app feedback.