It's well known that Apple and Google are highly guarded around the information they decide to share on how users interact with product pages. App Store Connect and the Google Play Console let you know visits, redownloads, and referrer, for example, but they're guarded around anything descriptive.
There may be some improvements coming on the horizon with Custom Product Pages coming from Apple, which will let users discover average proceeds per paying user. However, this still doesn't get to the root of the behaviour taking place on the stores, nor does it include Google Play improvements.
At ASO Giraffe, we get millions of events coming through from our users running tests and optimising their product pages. With this data, we're able to provide more concrete insight into how users interact with product pages, how far they scroll down the page, how many screenshots they open, how many view the reviews in full screen and more!
In this article, as the title suggests, we want to dive into some specifics on reviews. How are users interacting with reviews on the Google Play store pages? We'll answer the following 5 questions:
How many users on Google Play product pages...
To kick things off, let's look at a typical Google Play page:
What we see is that there are 5 main interactions a visitor can have with reviews on the Google Play product page:
We'll centre our insights around these interaction methods...
Wow! 75% of visitors to your Google Play pages will not scroll the page at all. It's important to bear in mind throughout that we're mainly talking about users from performance marketing here, and also that users on larger phones will see more of the product page than those on smaller phones, but still! Those hard won visitors aren't sticking around for long, let's hope most of them are installing the app!
Okay this is the big one! Ignore the score for now, ah we could have had a few extra values after the decimal if only we didn't have that bad release last month that broke authentication, it was only out for a day or so, but oh man those users were unhappy... um anyway, how many users scroll to this section?
Wow! That's not too bad. Seems that lots of people make it past the Description at least, although that could just be because it's short... and there's your app score here, larger than life, and the total number of users who've reviewed. We can't all reach 8 million like Candy Crush, but we can try, at least for those ~20% of users that scroll down here.
Oh dear, that's embarrassing... but there's gold dust in those reviews! People pay money for those over at TrustPilot! Turns out that a little grey arrow doesn't make for a very compelling CTA, at all. It's almost like Google don't want users to see all those reviews, what do you reckon they're hiding?
Actually - did you even know this button took you to full screen reviews? Don't be shy, speak up!
From the tests conducted via the ASO Giraffe platform, we've discovered that in the past year, 8.75% of users who visit our Google Play experience pages have scrolled down (or otherwise viewed if they are on larger phones) to the reviews section. It's a shame in a way, because this is probably the review you'd want everyone to see!
Below the top positive review section, is the top negative review section, the bane of any App Store Optimizer, let's hope they're paying a backhanded compliment here eh?
So how many users scroll to the top negative review section?
Phew! That's not so bad, most people aren't even really reaching there! I don't know why that executive was making such a big deal about it... now you can use this as ammunition to show them why there are better things to be focussing on! Or you can ignore this and continue to use it to justify those issues you've been keen on fixing. Well, at least you know now...
For this analysis we used the aggregate information for all the tests run on ASO Giraffe this year. The behaviour will mainly be relevant for users who come to product pages via performance marketing.
So that's it! In this article we've tried to answer the 5 most common questions related to user interaction on reviews on the Google Play store. Did we miss anything out that you feel should be included? Did these results match your expectations? Reach out to us and let us know! We'd love to continue the discussion and put together a part 2.
Remember that we are talking about behaviours on average, your app's Google Play store may render different results. So, if you want to stop relying on guesswork, and want to truly understand how users are using your store pages, you should get in touch and run a test with ASO Giraffe!
