AppFollow Blog What is AppFollow?

Your app reputation is everything. With millions of apps out there, the competition is fierce. How can one even hope to punch through all this noise and put their app forward, for all to see? The answer is simple: the star rating. This is the ultimate metric that drives app growth. Apps with a rating of 4 stars and higher get 80% of the market revenue (and gain about 15-20% conversion rate!). Even just shifting over from 3.99 to 4 will already yield incredible results. These outcomes are a sum of a tricky equation: strong app + good marketing + solid review management. Take one of these factors out and the whole thing collapses. What’s more, user feedback is everywhere, not just in the app stores.  What your users say is invaluable, even if they are really angry with you for whatever reason. How can you move forward with your product if you don’t know what the customers want? How can you get an alert to an unexpected bug but via the first handful of reviews or social posts?  Indeed! This is AppFollow’s mission: to help you truly understand your users, and act on this feedback. This will yield you product insights, a higher star rating, and better revenue. If you are unfamiliar with AppFollow and what our reputation management platform does, this is the ultimate explainer.  What is AppFollow? In short, AppFollow helps you keep your app's reputation spotless. You get a whole range of AI tools that make it easy to manage reviews, track analytics, and improve your app page. You truly understand your users so you can give them the best experience possible. With AppFollow, you've got everything you need to keep your customers happy and your app thriving, namely: Manage app reputation in the app stores and beyondAutomate review managementGet instant insights and reporting on user sentimentIdentify and scale top traffic channelsUnderstand campaigns' impact on downloads and revenueGet user feedback to improve your appAnalyze downloads, revenue, and app releases across storesResearch competitors and trends AppFollow integrates tools to save time, automate tasks, and uncover growth opportunities without juggling multiple solutions and manual data work.  When it comes to your team, AppFollow can help your agents show their progress—track their reply rate and speed. Managers need to watch the bigger picture: that’s why they can keep an eye on reply effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and average rating trends. These are the KPIs (out of many other KPIs you can track in AppFollow) that will help you achieve more. And let’s not forget product managers and marketers—the insights they can get are invaluable.  AppFollow also integrates directly with the following app stores: App Store Connect, Google Play Console, Mac App Store, Microsoft Store, Amazon, Apple Arcade, HUAWEI AppGallery, and Samsung Galaxy Store. Well, that’s the short of it. There are two major areas that AppFollow covers: app intelligence (a.k.a product insights, competitor intel, etc) and support (responding to reviews, automating reputation management, etc). Why don’t we take a better look at both of these things? Distilling insights from a sea of feedback First off, you’ll want to know what’s going on with your audience.  Say, you get 100,000 reviews over the last month. Some of them are on the App Store, some on Google Play, some on the Microsoft Store, and others are scattered across a number of your key communities. How do you actually learn what your users want to say, at a glance? Here are a few tools that will help with that: Semantic Analysis Sentiment analysis, a part of the Semantic Analysis features  The ultimate in understanding what’s going on within the review sections of your app stores—based on a historical curve that you can set up yourself. The Semantic Analysis algorithm tags all app reviews and lets you see the topics by their total volume. Tags are grouped by category, such as: Bugs: account, crash, freeze, connection, device, battery, login, geo, UI, slow, payment issues.Monetization: ads, refund requests, subscriptions, pricing.User feedback: app updates, complexity, established users, feature requests, design, promo codes, notifications, fraud, security, game balance, appreciation, use cases, customer serviceReport a concern: spam, offensive content, nonsensical reviews Oh, and a good thing when it comes to tackling the foul-mouthed and the spammers: you can use these tags with the Automated Report a Concern feature to flag inappropriate reviews…automatically! AI Summary One of the best things you can get for insights at a glance. Having a wild week after releasing a new feature and you’d like to know what people are thinking at the moment? This is the feature for you.  AI Summary makes dealing with customer feedback dead simple. It scans hundreds of reviews instantly so you can act immediately, instead of spending time analyzing everything first. Naturally, you can tweak the range of things you’d like to analyze—only positive reviews, or maybe only negatives, tags, etc.  You can use the AI summary for both semantic analysis and reviews analysis. And of course, if you’d like a quick update when something changes (say, to your Slack channel), you can set that up too.  ReportingCan we get all that on paper, you say? But of course. With the Reviews Summary report, you can track your app reviews daily, weekly, or monthly. It shows your current rating, new review count, and changes from the last period. New reviews are included. Need a quick update outside of AppFollow? The Ratings Summary report monitors rating changes and sends them to Slack, Telegram, or Email even if no changes occurred. It summarizes the current rating and period-over-period change. You can also set up multiple alerts for different apps and channels. In short, you can get key info in your preferred channel (email, Slack, Telegram), track essential metrics and events in one place, and set custom KPIs for critical data. Analyzing feedback beyond app stores Users don't just share feedback in app stores alone. They're flooding social media, bombarding support channels, and yes, still filling app store reviews with their thoughts. You need to know it too. There are 3 general tiers of feedback: Tier 1: Social media—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Discord, Reddit. Ignore these at your peril.Tier 2: Support channels—Email, chat, phone. Usually managed through HelpShift or Zendesk.Tier 3: App stores—Apple, Google Play, Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft. The classics. AppFollow is working hard at being able to reach all of them—not just via app stores.  You need both AI and automation to understand what’s going on there. AI handles the heavy lifting—analyzing patterns, translating languages, and creating personalized responses. Automation takes care of tagging and template responses. Save your humans for the complex stuff machines can't handle yet.  Tackling reviews faster and with more precision As much as one might love to provide a personal response in every single situation, that’s just not sustainable as you grow. How many people must you have in your team if you get 50,000 reviews a month? How about 150,000?  If you leave reviews that are not “urgent” on the table, you miss out on the opportunity to shift your rating towards the coveted 4.5+ stars.  Normally, the strategy is to respond first to the most important reviews: Negative reviewsFeatured reviews That then leaves positive and neutral reviews without a response. A 5-star review deserves a thank you (and it’s so easy to do!). A neutral review should get a response as well, probing if there is something else your team can do. And that goes for all sorts of reviews. Now, here’s how to get it sorted: The Reply Effect The framework Before we start with everything that can help you get your review management on track, let’s talk about one of the most important metrics: The Reply Effect. This metric shows exactly how your responses change user ratings. When you reply to someone's complaint and they change their rating—that's the Reply Effect in action. This metric is only calculated if the change happens within three months. After that, too many variables muddy the water—app updates, fixes, promotions. Here's what counts: A user responds to your reply? That's neutral. Did they boost their rating? That's a win. Did they drop their rating? You could do better. Did they change their review without replying to you? Doesn't count. Did they write a new response within three months? That counts. What this metric truly does is help you understand how to approach reviews. For instance, when ratings tank, jump on it fast: Reply immediately to show you careTell your dev team if it's a real problemGet back to users once it's fixed Two things matter on top of that: Users must actually respond to youIt has to happen within three months Our research shows most review changes happen without any developer input—we're talking about 4,743 changes with no replies versus 590 with replies. That's telling. Watch "Agent Performance" to see how your team handles individual conversations. "Reviews Analysis" gives you the big picture—final outcomes only, no matter how much back-and-forth happened. One catch: "Agent Performance" only shows replies through AppFollow. If you're using app store consoles directly, those numbers won't show up. So, how do you improve it? Automation The first step towards greatness! Set up some templates, and then let the robots categorize feedback (via auto-tags) and automatically respond based on the rules you’ve set up.  Mind you, there is a difference between automation and AI (as you will learn below). Automation is a set of pre-determined rules, where if something outside of your framework happens, the system won’t do anything. AI, on the other hand, takes over (again, based on conditions, but beyond what you can script yourself) and responds to all reviews that qualify.  So, dealing with an avalanche of simi