Review Analysis: What Drives First Time and Rare Reviewers?

First time reviewers were on the fence

First time reviewers left a divided set of reviews. Sentiment analysis revealed first-time-reviewer posts were 50% negative and 50% positive, leaving reviews either out of love or hate.

When we looked at emotion-categorized reviews, we found that the posts were really varied. 47% of emotion-categorized reviews was angry, followed by 29% joyful and 11% fearful that a product wouldn’t live up to their expectations.

First time positive reviews from consumers in the last 18 months included keywords like:

• Good – 45k mentions
• Great – 37k mentions
• Love – 23k mentions
• Works well – 20k mentions
• Feel – 24k mentions

While negative first time reviewers included key words like:

• Bad – 19k mentions
• Smell – 15k mentions
• Customer care – 9k mentions
• Issue  – 8k mentions
• Disappointed – 7k mentions

Consumers want quality products and good customer care when things went wrong. Smell and feel were also important qualities that first time reviewers took into consideration.

“I never leave a review, but…” reviewers tended to have positive feedback

Consumers who wrote that they ‘never’ wrote reviews actually left overwhelmingly positive reviews. Sentiment analysis showed that 72% of these reviews are positive, compared to just 28% negative.

The most common positive keywords were:

• Great – 16k mentions
• Good – 13k mentions
• Love – 8k mentions
• Recommend – 7k mentions
• Amazing – 6k mentions

Meanwhile, negative keywords were much lower in volume and focused on price and service:

• Bad – 8k mentions
• Money – 8k mentions
• Feel – 7k mentions
• Service – 7k mentions
• Worth – 6k  mentions

Timing

Our Consumer Research platform found that for both first time reviewers and ‘never’ reviewers, there was one clear seasonal trend.

January was a peak month for businesses to receive reviews from these groups. This influx of reviews tended to be about holiday gifts, given or received.