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ReviewMeta Adjusted Rating

February 1st, 2016

The RevewMeta Adjusted Rating cuts through the noise of biased reviews and allows you see to see what the average rating should actually look like.  After filtering out all of the unnaturally appearing reviews, we recalculate the average rating and display that prominently at the top of each report. We also use the ReviewMeta Adjusted Rating to determine a product’s overall analysis result. If the Adjusted Rating is much lower than the original rating, this can trigger a failing grade.

How it works

As part of our analysis for each product, we assign a weight to each review based on our findings. Reviews which are consistently in the subsets that fail our tests will carry a reduced weight, and even may be thrown out altogether.

For example, if a particular review is not only an Unverified Purchase, but also shares repetitive phrases with other reviews of the same product and was written by a reviewer who has only reviewed this brand, we might throw this review out entirely.

An Adjusted Rating may still be misleading: be sure to check the number of remaining reviews.

In addition to providing the Adjusted Rating, we also let you know how many reviews the new rating is based off of.  Sometimes a product that originally has 5 stars with 500 reviews will still have 5 stars, but only 3 reviews.  When our adjusted rating is only based off of a few reviews, it may not be as reliable as if it is based off more reviews.

What happens if there are insufficient trustworthy reviews?

In some cases, a product will fail so many of our tests that our algorithm will throw out all of the reviews.  When this happens, there’s not much we can do other than tell you that we didn’t find any reviews that look natural which we can base our adjusted rating off of. Needless to say, having no natural reviews is a big red flag.

When the Adjusted Rating is higher than the original.

Sometimes the original rating is lower than the Adjusted Rating, making it appear as if the Adjusted Rating increased rather than decreased. But we don’t weight any reviews up; this occurs because each review platform uses a different formula to calculate the average product rating. Sometimes they may still be counting deleted reviews, or other times they use their own weighted average. But we don’t know exactly how their secret formula works. Like you, we can only see the average rating that is listed on the platform.

 

Product Ranks:

product-ranks

Product ranks are where the product lands if you order all products in that category from best to worst.  (We take into account the number of reviews each product has; a 5-star product with only one review won’t beat a 4.8-star product with 100 reviews).  A rank of 100% means it’s the best in the category, and a rank of 0% means it’s the worst in the category.  On the left, you’ll see the original product rank, and on the right, our adjusted rank based on our adjusted rating.

Just like the adjusted rating, a product rank may increase even if the report shows a “FAIL”.  You also may see a product ranked in their parent category – this is because we might not have sufficient data in their actual category to assign a rank.  As we analyze more and more data, you’ll see better data.

Ultimately, our Adjusted Rating is just another tool to assist your research.

Our Adjusted Rating is a quick and easy estimate to see an overview of how unnatural reviews might be affecting a product’s overall rating. But you should always be sure to thoroughly read the report and check the example reviews before making a decision to purchase a product. We offer you tools to help scrutinize reviews more efficiently than ever before, however it’s still advisable to critically examine our reports and the reviews themselves to draw your own conclusions.  


3 responses to “ReviewMeta Adjusted Rating”

  1. Bill Carson says:

    I analyze the validity of Amazon reviews for about 10 percent of purchases, but It takes time to click on a sample of reviewers and then reading their review history. Thanks for doing the work for me! (But I’ll still double check you now and then.)

  2. Jack Robins says:

    Far out!

  3. Erik V says:

    Thank you guys!

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