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What is Review Mining? A Beginner’s Guide to App Review Analysis

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Introduction

Mobile app reviews are key drivers when it comes to the success of your new app.

Positive and negative reviews can attract or deter new app users. App reviews can directly impact your acquisition goals and your app visibility on the app store. Apart from all this, there is yet another significant advantage of app reviews. They give insights into the user experience and sentiment, help discover bugs, improve functionality, and even develop new features.

If you limit yourself to your app reviews for insights, you will become a ‘reactive’ developer. This is a big mistake if you want to improve your mobile app for your users consistently. What you want to do is anticipate the needs and demands of your users before they come to you with feedback instead of reacting to it.

How do you do that?

The answer is quite simple. You need to perform a thorough competitive analysis and mine reviews. We’ll get to that later. However, you need to build a mobile app first. You can either spend months coding and testing your app, or you can build an app within a day with Appy Pie’s AppMakr. AppMakr is a no-code development platform that helps you create business apps without needing to code. Try it out!

What is review mining?

Review mining is the process of diving deep into competitor app reviews to find qualitative data that can help you improve your app’s visibility and quality. It is a great way to leverage user reviews and feedback, and gain a competitive advantage.

By digging into the competitor’s app reviews, you get access to customer opinions that can help you make informed decisions about your app. This means you can get great application insights on which features and functionalities your target customers are looking forward to.

You can also learn from the competitor’s negative feedback and make sure that you do not repeat their mistakes. You can use all the information from review mining for keyword generation. These keywords can then be used to improve your app store profile, which will help your app rank better on all app stores.

Let’s first understand some basic concepts before getting into the review mining and data mining process.

Sentiment Analysis

When you analyze reviews, you can categorize them based on positive and negative reviews or the specifics of what the users are saying. It is a good idea to group reviews and create an idea of sentiment using groups of keywords.

Customer sentiment analysis is not easy to do or even understand if you are new to it. There are multiple sentiment analysis tools online which can help you with your sentiment analysis marketing.

Let’s take it slow and try to understand the concept of sentiment analysis in its most basic form. Sentiment analysis involves grouping keywords into themes that may be more meaningful than the straightforward analysis of high-frequency keywords.

Keyword generation

Review mining has one important element – keyword generation. Review mining helps in a great way with keyword discovery. As you go through positive app reviews with a fine-tooth comb, you would find the perfect keywords for your app.

This technique of keyword discovery is great even for smaller developers looking for targeted keywords with low competition.

Not only is it important for writing the sales copy, but also for your app store listing.

How to mine reviews?

There are multiple ways to mine data that can be employed to get customer insights from competitor analysis. Of course, you can pay for data mining applications like SensorTower, MobileAction, or AppTweak. But you can even do it for free.

Here are three elementary steps to do a manual competitor audit:

1. Set up a tracking sheet

You would want to jump in and start looking at App Store reviews or Google Play reviews, but first, you need to set up a tracking sheet to record all the data. The easiest way to do this is to create an excel sheet to track keyword occurrences across app star ratings.

This tracking sheet gives you an idea of your users’ positive and negative sentiment for certain keywords.



2. Mine the reviews

If your competitors have only a few current app reviews, you can manually go through them on the App Store and the Google Play Store. However, suppose you need to study several competitors who have multiple reviews or want to categorize apps according to their app versions, country, date, etc. In that case, you can use a platform like AppAnnie to copy and paste the reviews into excel, where you can further break it down into more manageable pieces.

3. Analyze results

Once you have the app reviews in front of you, you would develop a clear understanding of the language and words people are using to describe their positive app experiences. It gives you the ability to generate keywords that you can use in your app store listing and description.

Once you quantify the quality or sentiment of groupings, these can help you benchmark your efforts against competitors. In this way, you can get some guidance on improving the app and finding the features you should be adding to your app.



For example, if you want to look closely at the pricing statement, track keywords across a couple of competitors and benchmark your results against them. If this is how your benchmarking looks like, it is time to rethink the price strategy. One good way to do this is by learning what app A is doing wrong and app B is doing right!

Conclusion

Manual app review mining is a long and tedious process, but it bears excellent returns. App review analysis tells you what you need to do about your app and what you should steer clear of.

Of course, there are multiple data mining tools, sentiment analysis tools, keyword generators, but with some patience and work, you can do it all for free!

Do you have an app already, or are you still planning to turn your brilliant app idea into a real app? Let Appy Pie make your dreams come true! Click on the button below and get going now!

Did you enjoy reading the blog? Let me know in the comments section if there is anything you would like me to add here!