Use App Review Sentiment Analysis to Make Product Decisions

We’ve just added a keyword density analysis to our Reviews and Rating section. AppTweak now automatically reveals the most repeated keywords across your app’s reviews and the sentiment they are associated with. Performing a keyword analysis on your reviews can help you rapidly identify what your users are talking about, what they like and dislike about your app, how your latest update has been received, etc. It can also be a great source of inspiration for your keyword optimization. To illustrate how to get actionable insights out of this new feature, we did a case study of the game Gardenscapes.

Capture what users are saying about your app

The first thing you’ll want to do with our Keyword Analysis is to understand what is it users most value about your app, and what is it they don’t appreciate. In this new feature, we show which keywords are most repeated across your app’s reviews. This helps capture what your users are mostly talking about when referring to your app.

For each keyword in the analysis, we show the average rating of the associated reviews, so that you have a sense of users’ sentiment regarding that word and a trend over time so that you can see if the use of this keyword is quite recent or stable over time.

Let’s dive into our use case with Gardenscapes. Below are the most repeated keywords across Gardenscapes’ most recent reviews.

Most repeated keywords acrossGardenscapeslatest reviews (Apple App Store).

Already, we can see that there are few highly repeated keywords associated with a high average rating, only the words “fun”, “love” and “great” come out with an average above 4. Among the keywords associated with most negative ratings we find “money”, “advertised” and “ads”. The rest of the words tend to be used by users in mitigated ways. For example, words such as “levels”, “play”, “time” and “coins” and contained in reviews with both a very high and a very low score.

Reviews and Ratings: a customer feedback goldmine

For each keyword in the analysis, AppTweak gives a shortcut to directly access the corresponding reviews in order to better understand the context in which users are using these words. For instance, we checked the reviews associated with the keyword “levels” and found users were leaving both positive and negative ratings but all were complaining that the levels of the game get too hard. This is a sentiment shared even among users that like the game.

Positive and negative reviews forGardenscapesthat contain the keyword “levels”.

Based on this feedback, the game’s product team could identify which levels seem to be the most blocking for users and find ways to improve their gaming experience within those levels.

How to reply to user reviews

Get immediate feedback on what users like vs. dislike about your app

If you want to know what users most or least appreciate about your app, you can use our Most Positive Keywords and Most Negative Keywords shortcuts. They will show you the most popular keywords that are associated with reviews with a high/low score.

We had a look at Gardenscapes’ Most Positive Keywords and found words such as “challenging”, “story”, “addicting”, “relaxing” and “austin”.

Popular keywords used inGardenscapes’ reviews that have a high average rating.

As we can see above, reviews containing the word “story” have an average rating of 4.15 and, in their associated reviews, users comment that they really enjoy the storyline of the game. Reviews with the word “Austin” have an average rating of 4.0, showing that he is an appreciated character of the game. Keywords such as “entertaining”, “challenging”, “addictive” or “relaxing” give us a better idea of which aspects users most like about the game. They are also a great source of inspiration for the game’s keyword optimization.

How to increae your Reviews and Ratings with the iOS Prompt

If we take a look at Most Negative Keywords tab, we find keywords such as “scam”, “advertise” and “false advertising”. All of these match reviews with very poor average ratings.

Popular keywords used inGardescapes’ reviews that have a low average rating.

Looking closer into the reviews that contain these words, we found that users are complaining about misleading ads. Users seem to be attracted by the re-scaping aspect of the game shown in the ads, however, once the game is installed, they seem to be disappointed by a lack of choice in the scenarios. This is another example of how reviews can give better insights to the game’s product team on how to improve the gameplay and better meet user expectations.

Example ofGardescapes’ reviews that contain the keyword “false advertising”.

Don’t forget to get back to these users. It’s important not to leave negative reviews unanswered. In AppTweak, you can answer any review directly from the AppTweak tool. Answering your users will show other potential users that you care about your customers and their feedback.

How to Reply to Review and why it’s important

You can end up spending hours digging into an app’s reviews, it’s amazing the amount of information you learn! We did our best at AppTweak to make this process easier and more efficient by already highlighting the most repeated terms, and separating those with a positive vs. negative sentiment. Check out what your users are saying about your app, I’m sure you’ll learn something new!