Strategic use of mobile guides is a great way to boost your app’s presence on the Apple Store and Google Play. Your users can rate your mobile app with in-app ratings for both the Apple Store and Google Play. Allowing your users to rate your app provides various benefits:
- Attracts more users
- Improves app visibility with higher rankings
- Builds trust with positive feedback and reviews
- Provides valuable insights from user feedback for app enhancement
Best practices for collecting feedback
The in-app rating request provides your users with the opportunity to give feedback on your app in a public environment. You might also prefer to keep the feedback internal by polling your users. You can also use a combination of both methods. For example, first poll your users and get their feedback. Then gather up all of your happy users in a segment and ask them to rate you in the app store through a simple guide.
Poll your users to collect feedback
Before you ask your users for an app store rating, you can use polls to collect valuable user feedback or understand sentiment. Poll types available are:
- Open text
- Number scale
- Multiple choice
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
When asking for an in-app rating, consider the following guidelines:
- Pick the right moment, like after completing a task.
- Use segments to target review requests based on user segments that indicate engaged users.
- Avoid excessive requests, and follow Apple and Google guidelines for optimal frequency.
- Avoid directing dissatisfied users to an internal poll and satisfied users to rate the app in the app store.
Note: This dialog opens at Apple's or Google's discretion. It’s dependent on the history of the user in the app and their previous rating request history, as well as whether the user previously opted out from such requests. To support Apple’s and Google's guidelines, this action attempts to open the rating dialog and doesn't guarantee it. Follow Apple and Google guidelines for optimal frequency.
Prequalifying questions
Google and Apple frown on pre-qualifying responses and might suppress reviews that they deem too targeted. Keep it simple by skipping pre-qualifying questions. Avoid asking questions like:
- Do you like the app?
- Would you give this app a rating of 5 stars?
- Do you find our app user-friendly?
Strategic segments
You can use segments to target review requests that indicate engaged users. Suggestions for segments include:
- NPS promoters. Leverage the positive sentiment to gather impactful reviews.
- Poll responders. Focus on users who actively respond to polls.
- Power users. Capitalize on their extensive experience for detailed reviews.
Open an in-app rating request
- Open the guide in the Visual Design Studio.
-
In the Edit Button window, select the button action Open in-app rating + Dismiss guide.
- Select Done to finish, then save the guide and exit the Visual Design Studio.
Note: Android in-app rating is supported on devices with Android API 21+. For Android, the in-app rating feature works differently depending on the SDK version you have. If you have SDK version 2.19 and later, the feature uses com.google.android.play:review:2.0.0dependency library. Customers who want to use the Pendo in-app rating feature but are still using the old monolithic com.google.android.play:core library must either use the new split Google Play libraries or downgrade to SDK version 2.18, the last version that works with com.google.android.play:core libraries. You can check with your developers for help on how to use the in-app rating feature.
Best practice for activating the app store rating request
This section offers Pendo's recommended way to activate the app store rating request. Use activation settings to optimize review requests by targeting moments of user satisfaction. We recommend filtering for users who have:
- Completed a task
- Spent a considerable amount of time in your application
- Achieved a milestone that you deem important
Pendo doesn't recommend repeatedly sending requests for reviews that interrupt a user's workflow, or immediately upon app launch.
To activate the rating request:
- In the Visual Design Studio, select Activation.
- In Activation Settings, select Target Element.
- In the Page Selection window, select the page where you want the request to show.
- In the Page, select the Feature.
- In the Target Element Settings window, confirm the settings and select Done.
- Select Save & Exit.
For more information, see Google's documentation and Apple's documentation.