I have been keeping track of the number of daily Trustpilot reviews on Upstart. Borrowers who complete a loan transaction with Upstart are all invited to write a review on Trustpilot.
According to Trustpilot: “Trustpilot displays reviews chronologically, with the most recent review at the top. We don’t monitor reviews as they come in — they’re not manually moderated or censored before being published. Once posted, reviews are instantly visible to everyone.”
Below is the averaged number of Trustpilot reviews per day for each month. This has seen a general steady climb upward over the past year.
June 11.23333333
May 11.5483871
April 11.53333333
March 9.741935484
February 10.5
January 8.322580645
December 7.903225806
November 3.933333333
October 3.677419355
September 2.033333333
August 3.516129032
It is on average, 3-4 reviews a day from August to Nov 2020, then a jump to about 8-10/day from Dec to March.
Over the last quarter it has been about 11 reviews per day from April to June.
However, starting on July 1 2021, the number of reviews per day suddenly exploded to crazy high numbers:
14-Jul 98
13-Jul 101
12-Jul 84
11-Jul 49
10-Jul 64
9-Jul 79
8-Jul 86
7-Jul 87
6-Jul 75
5-Jul 51
4-Jul 30
3-Jul 38
2-Jul 67
1-Jul 58
I don’t know what’s going on here. For the past 2 weeks this July, the daily number of reviews is averaging 69! Over 6 times the average daily reviews in just the past month of June.
Does this mean anything? Did Upstart somehow encourage a higher proportion of users to write reviews? Or did Upstart improve their AI/ML underwriting and ad targeting to drive conversion rates even higher?
I tried to correlate this data with Google Trends, but the Google search popularity for the terms Upstart, Upstart login, Upstart loan doesn’t appear to have spiked 6 times since July 1.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&am…
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&am…
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&am…
While Alexrank’s traffic analysis on Upstart.com has also shown a very steady climb upward the past 90 days (23.88% jump from #22385 rank to #17039 rank), there’s also not a sudden spike as seen on Trustpilot.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/upstart.com#section_traffic
Any thoughts would be appreciated.