The right way to buy reviews: optimizing your strategy.

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In today’s blog, we’ll discuss how you as a developer can schedule the flow of incentivized reviews to promote your app in the most safe and effective way. For that, you’ll need to know the basic mechanics of App Store and Google Play.

Complications start from the very beginning. The first portion of reviews must depend on whether you’re planning to promote a newly released app or a well-established one. As you may already know, amount of reviews and downloads is one of the most important factors stores consider while building rankings apps in search results. It’s quite obvious that the older the app is, the more ratings and downloads it has, and thus more of them is needed to make a difference. In other words, the higher an app is ranked, the less volatile its position becomes. Thus, if you’re a huge developer with popular apps in the profile, you must be ready to buy several hundreds of reviews to improve rankings and drive organic downloads. Conversely, if you want to promote a newly-made app, a huge amount of reviews is going to draw unwanted attention as it looks clearly suspicious. To ensure safety, we recommend you to start with just a few reviews a day, not more than 10, and then slowly increasing their number in a naturally-looking way. However, there is one rule common to both cases: the quantity of incentivized reviews must not hugely exceed the quantity of organic ones. Numbers here differ for Google Play and iTunes. If you buy reviews for Google Play, they must not be more than twice the number of real reviews. For iTunes their quantity must not exceed that of organic reviews in more than 3 times.

So, buying reviews with the intention to boost your app’s rankings is quite obvious. Let’s talk about other situations when buying reviews may be hugely useful for your app. Surely, it may be done not only to straightforwardly improve your rankings, but to make your page more alluring to your potential users. To illustrate, if an app has a lot of negative reviews and low rating, it surely turns off many people. Just look at the graph below.

The different in conversion between 5 and 4 stars may be not that significant (though in some categories even 4 stars are considered to be a failure), but from 3 and 5 stars conversion doubles! Here the more detailed insight into how ratings influence downloads:

Surely, again, if the app is old, you might need to buy much more reviews to manipulate an app’s rating. However, there is one peculiar exception: iTunes hides reviews and ratings for older versions of an app. It’s a chance to start building your app’s rating from scratch! Here we come to the next tip: buying reviews after an update may be much more effective, as you’ll need much less reviews to actually influence the rating. From our experience, the optimal number of post-update reviews is 30. Unfortunately, in Google Play it doesn’t work that way — it always counts all ratings and reviews. Because of that, in case of poor ratings, it is crucial to fix issues with your app, improve it, and only then buy incentivized traffic.

Concluding, I would just like to give you a couple of small useful tips. A great timing to buy reviews is right before a huge promo campaign. Even if your app’s ratings are not the best possible, if a new users comes and sees many positive reviews made recently, he or she might think that you’ve made an important update eliminating all possible issues or improving functionality, and that will clearly drive your organic downloads. Also, the very important thing to mention is that if you have many positive reviews and high ratings, you might catch the eye of Google or iTunes, which is your chance to get featured. That’s an opportunity you don’t want to miss, believe me. From our experience, being featured may increase you downloads in more than 100 times! That surely will guarantee you a place in top of the charts for a long time ahead.

I hope this week post was helpful for you. We strive to make sure that our customers exploit FewReview to its full potential, and buy reviews in the most efficient and safe way. If you have any questions, submit them to our email, and we’ll cover them in future posts. Stay tuned!