Overview
If your app is available in multiple countries, you may want different teams or Support agents to reply to reviews from specific locales.
When you reply to iOS reviews from the App Store, you may already be using the "Country" filter to create Smart Views or Workspaces based on the reviewer's country. When you reply to Android (Google Play) reviews, we offer a language filter instead.
To categorize reviews with the goal of distributing them to language-specific Support agents and teams, we recommend filtering Google Play reviews by language instead of by country.
In this article, we'll go over why you can filter Google Play reviews by language, but not by country.
Google Play Countries in the Developer Console
When you set up a Google Play Reply to Reviews Integration, we collect your app's reviews directly from the Google Play Developer Console.
You'll see a "Country" filter in the console's review feed, and may ask, "Why is the country filter unavailable in AppFollow?"
While the Country filter is available in the Developer Console, we observe inconsistencies in the data it provides. These inconsistencies appear because when using the country filter in the Developer Console, Google will filter reviews by the country the user was located in when the user wrote the review — not by the country of the user's account.
In the example below, we set the filter to show us reviews from Finland. In the results, we see several reviews in the Russian language, from both English and Russian devices. While these reviews may have been written in the territory of Finland, this does not help the app's Finnish Support team reply to the reviews. It would make more sense for them to go to a team that focuses on a different language or locale.
Our goal is to ease sorting and grouping while working with reviews – this is why we have made the decision to provide a language filter instead.
Google Play Countries in the Public Source
If you do not have a Google Play Reply to Reviews Integration, we collect an app's reviews from the app's webpage – you can find it by searching for the app in your browser's search.
It's possible to open different pages for each locale of an app. This is helpful when you want to see what your app's rating is in different countries and understand how your app looks to users across the world.
Use our Rating Chart to track the ratings an end user sees in every locale where your app is available.
When it comes to tracking reviews from these pages, Google displays them by language; not by the user's country.
In the examples below, we are looking at the UK and US versions of an app. You'll notice that the English reviews are duplicated across these two locales (and other English-speaking countries such as Canada, Australia, etc.). This means we cannot use the "Country" filter for these reviews either; otherwise, you would see duplicated reviews in AppFollow.
Recommendations
When working with Google Play reviews, we recommend focusing on the review's language. This approach will help you build a strategy to route reviews to the team that is best equipped to handle a review in a specific language.
You can use the following approaches to sort and segment your reviews:
- Create team Workspaces and add specific countries (for iOS) and languages (for Google Play) in the Workspace settings. When your Support agents log into AppFollow and access their team Workspace, they will see the specific reviews they need to work on.
- Use a single worldwide Workspace and create Smart Views (filter presets) based on the review's language. Your team can switch to their view to see their open reviews.
- Filter and Sort Reviews in the Reviews Feed if you have only an occasional need to filter out specific reviews, but otherwise prefer working with all reviews at the same time.