When you look at a Google Play app's rating on our Rating Analysis, you may be looking at either Public data or Google Play Console data. Console data is only available if the Google Play Ratings Connection is set up for your app. In this article, you'll learn about these two data sources and find out how to differentiate between them in your AppFollow Workspace.
Public data
The ratings displayed in the Public data tab are either country-specific or worldwide. We collect these absolute figures directly from the public app pages in Google Play.
For countries where there's not enough rating data, Google Play shows a “default” rating with unknown calculations.
These ratings are publicly available to end-users visiting your app's page in Google Play Store in a specific country. We show the totals for the last date of the timeframe you selected in the page’s filter sections (for example, if you choose September 1st – September 7th, you’ll see the totals as they appeared on September 7th).
- Ratings over time – the total number of ratings your app received from the app’s launch to the end of the selected timeframe.
- Total displayed rating – the app’s total average rating at the end of the selected timeframe.
- Total displayed rating breakdown – the distribution of total ratings for the selected timeframe, displayed as a percentage and absolute value. This section breaks down ratings by stars so that you can evaluate the portion of 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1-star ratings.
Google Play Console Data
Google Play Console Worldwide ratings come directly from your Google Developer Console. This data is only available to the developer of the app.
When you add a Google Play Ratings Integration, you can pull this data into AppFollow to see the exact number of worldwide ratings you received on a specific day, week, or month.
In some cases, incremental ratings by country are available within the Google Play Console. However, AppFollow does not have access to this section, so we can only retrieve incremental worldwide ratings. Technically, it's not possible for us to extract country-specific incremental data. Additionally, we’ve determined that this data cannot be considered fully reliable. The country-specific incremental ratings shown in AppFollow are based on our internal calculations, while those displayed in the console are generated by Google Play using an undisclosed methodology. As a result, discrepancies may occur between the two sources.
Why do the ratings change?
Google Play public ratings are calculated using an average weighted calculation. Google does not disclose the details of this calculation.
The total public rating does not always increase on a day-to-day basis. You may see a lower number at a later date when compared to an earlier date. For example, there were 651 5-star ratings at the beginning of February, but at the end of February, the total changed to 632 5-star ratings. It's normal to see a lower count of ratings when looking at public data.
The changes in the totals can be explained by recalculations that factor in updates to ratings and rating removals. For example, if several users change their 5-star ratings to 4-star ratings, you'll see a lower count of 5-star ratings at a later date.
Why are public and private worldwide ratings different?
Public and private worldwide ratings will not add up, because the data is taken from different sources: public ratings are from the public app page, and the Google Play Console rating is from the developer console. Keep on reading for more details below.
Country-specific and Worldwide Ratings (Public)
If you're looking at Incremental country-specific or worldwide ratings for a Google Play app, you will see the daily distribution between the ratings that Google shows on the app's public page (the page that end-users see when they look up your app in the store). We take this data for 1 date, compare it to the other, and calculate the difference between them to show the distribution.
Why are there no past (historical) ratings?
When you add the Ratings integration, we collect all the available worldwide rating stats from the Google Developer Console. There's no way to retrieve more data than is available in the Console, but you'll see everything that is currently available there.
💡 Need more info about ratings? Check out our dedicated article: Rating Analysis (Stars)