With the help of work on the pop-up, DevGame managed not only to raise the rating of its two applications, but also to significantly increase the number of ratings issued per day. Elena Vereshchagina, CMO of the company, told about how it was done.
Elena Vereshchagina
A good rating is an excellent tool for conversion to installation, the opportunity to be noticed by the market for a feature, good retention, and as a result, earnings.
We would like to share with you the successful experiments of DevGame with the voice box in children’s games.
Let’s note right away: we always implement custom voting windows, preparing texts a little more exciting than “Hey, leave a review!” in the standard system window. After all, we are focused on children and their parents, from whom it is 5 times more difficult to get a review than in an “adult game”, which means that it is necessary to entice.
We never show pop-up voting “stupidly”: at the first launch of the application, immediately after purchase, after 3 minutes of the game or at the beginning of the 5th session. For each application, the display location is thought out and verified (and then checked with the help of analytics).
Despite our experience and constant experiments, the results of the cases that we plan to tell you about have given such an increase in ratings and the number of reviews on Google Play that we have never seen in 10 years of working on the market.
The main geo is Russia and the CIS.
We conducted two experiments on two different applications.
Case 1
Case results
The first experiment was conducted in the Fixiki Dream House application on Google Play – this is a game for children 6-9 years old “with elements” of home improvement, memory and cleaning.
The results of the case are as follows:
- 4.8 is the score of the game.
- 308 is the largest number of evaluations per day, where the DAU was about 50 thousand.
- 15634 – total ratings for 4 months of the project life. 13,830 (89%) of them are fives.
In this experiment, we not only improved the rating in the store, but also greatly increased the number of reviews, bringing them to 5.5 thousand.
Compared to our other applications, the difference in the number of reviews is enormous, given that the application is one of the new ones.
What have we done?
1. We wrote the text and thought out the type of pop-up.
For this application, we chose the text that could motivate the user to leave a review, not just an assessment. The point of the game is to buy items that need to be furnished in the room (as in The Sims), and we decided to focus on the text and did not add anything more to the picture.
2. We have chosen a place for voting.
The voting system should be set when the user is already involved in the game, and which does not violate the gameplay in order to minimize the percentage of pop-up closure.
In our games, we always show this pop-up twice and in different places.
In “Fixiki Dream House” for the first time we show the voting system when we give the user a gift. This happens after eight levels of the game “Memory”.
The gift was shown, the player pressed the “Get” button, chose a place for the item and then, against the background of positive emotions, saw a pop-up of the voice box.
It is important that the pop-up does not violate the logic of the ad display, does not turn out before the gift is installed.
If the user did not vote (closed the pop-up), we show the voting again after 4 levels, when the most loyal users already remain.
According to this scheme, we work in almost all of our applications.
We published a build with a well-developed voting system a couple of weeks later than the official launch. Before the update, the voting system according to the old scheme brought us 840 ratings and 109 reviews (13%) in a week.
The number of ratings and their distribution before the update:
5 ★ (749)
4 ★ (46)
3 ★ (17)
2 ★ (4)
1 ★ (24)
The day after the update, we saw 110 ratings and 41 reviews (37.3% of people not only rated, but also wrote a review), and the record was reached on the eighth of July, when we received 308 ratings and 130 reviews (42.2%).
Considering the percentage ratio based on the number of new users, the number of ratings increased 2.4 times, and reviews almost fourfold. In the week after the update, we received 2,759 ratings and about 800 reviews.
Distribution of ratings on the eighth of July (one week after the update):
5 ★ (1527)
4 ★ (23)
3 ★ (19)
2 ★ (11)
1 ★ (29)
Thus, the developed voting system increased the share of 5%, while almost not increasing the share of negative reviews.
Summing up or Anticipating your questions:
– For sure, everything fell down later!– Drops in reviews are observed only on the days of drawdown for new users, in percentage terms, the results achieved are stable.
– Yes, you took up the answers to the reviews!– We always respond to reviews, but it does not bring us a significant effect, our rating was changed by 3 users at most.
– So what if you have a lot of grades?– We have carried out measurements and there is reason to assert that a long strip with a rating of five and good reviews on the application page significantly raise the conversion from page viewing to installation.
Plus, the retention of users who put four and five is significantly higher than that of the rest of the users (the difference is about one and a half to two times).
Case 2
In the Fixiki Factory app on Google Play, we decided to experiment with different types of voice visualization.
A few words about “Fixiki Factory” is a game in which users help fixiki cook cakes.
- 4.8 is the score of the game.
- 5707 – total ratings for the nine months of the project’s life (of which 4184 fives).
- 1716 – total reviews.
Initially, the game had a voting system in which it was proposed to evaluate the quality of the project in the stars.
She brought an average of 100 ratings a day:
5 ★ (62)
4 ★ (8)
3 ★ (5)
2 ★ (5)
1 ★ (7)
Replacing stars with emoticons seriously increased the increase in ratings. People began to give grades twice as often.
After the increase, this number “reached a plateau”: it is still at the same level.
Distribution of ratings on average per day after the update:
5 ★ (150)
4 ★ (35)
3 ★ (6)
2 ★ (0)
1 ★ (8)
In addition to the direct increase in the number of evaluations, we saw the following results:
- The window with emoticons is closed 30% less often than with stars (“stars” are closed in 82% of cases, “smiles” in 52%).
- They put fives in “smiles” by 19% more.
- From “smiles” with ratings of four and five, 26% more users go to the store for rating.
- We get 18% more fives and 6.5% more fours in the voting with emoticons.
Results of the results
After experimenting and introducing a new voting system into the Fixiki: Dream House application, we were able to increase the conversion of the game so much that we came out on top at the request of Fixiki, on which the Fixiki Masters application has been firmly sitting for a long time. And, accordingly, significantly increased downloads.
And this means that there will be experiments in the future!