A large portion of operating a business these days involves managing your reputation online.
You need to increase the number of reviews your business receives, but you also need to monitor your reviews so you know exactly what your customers like and what they hate.
You can monitor reviews in two different ways: manually or with a dedicated review monitoring tool.
In this article, I cover tips on how to monitor reviews with either method.
How to Monitor Online Reviews: Overview
You can monitor online reviews manually on your own, but some businesses prefer to use a tool that makes it easier to monitor reviews from multiple platforms.
Monitoring reviews manually can be pretty time consuming (especially if your business is popular), but it does save you from having to research and pay for yet another third-party tool.
A review monitoring tool, on the other hand, collects reviews from multiple platforms and displays them within a single dashboard, making them much easier to manage.
Some tools even have additional features, such as a second interface for responding to reviews and another that tracks trends.
No matter which method you decide to use, your process for monitoring reviews should be relatively the same, involving:
- Verifying the validity of a review to ensure it’s real
- Responding to the review
- Making note of key factors, such as the review’s sentiment, length and inclusion of photos
Monitoring Online Reviews Manually
Follow these steps to monitor online reviews manually:
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- Make a list of every review platform your business is active on.
- Prioritize your list by order of importance.
- Hint: Google is the most important review platform as over 80% of consumers rely on it for reviews.
- Define a schedule for checking reviews.
- Create a spreadsheet with multiple sheets (one for each review platform) that allows you to monitor review sentiment, length and photo counts.
- Check each review platform, and record metrics in your spreadsheet.
- Respond to reviews promptly.
One issue here is your spreadsheet. Here’s a simple example I made in Google Sheets:
It has three sections that track:
- Review sentiment
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- Positive – For reviews that rave about your business
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- Negative – For reviews that have more complaints than praises
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- Neutral – For reviews that are generally positive but not exactly raving. They might even mention a few complaints
- Review length
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- Short – Reviews that are one or two lines long
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- Medium – Reviews that are around five to 10 lines long
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- Long – Reviews that are more than 10 lines long. They might even require multiple paragraphs
- Reviews with photos
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- Photos – Reviews that include customer photos
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- No photos – Reviews that don’t include customer photos
If you want to get more technical, you can also add sections for the following metrics:
- Review rating
- Time between each review
- Total number of photos you received
Once you have enough data, you can use your spreadsheet program or even a graphic design tool like Canva to create graphs. These will give you a visual representation of your data.
The main issue with monitoring reviews manually is actually taking the time to respond to reviews.
If you receive too many reviews, you might even struggle to respond to all of them in one sitting.
In this case, use a project management tool like Asana, ClickUp or Jira that allows you to create tasks and manage their progress.
These tools come with notification features that will remind you of reviews you need to respond to. You can even create tasks for monitoring reviews for different platforms and set up notifications for them as well.
Monitoring Online Reviews with Tools
Monitoring online reviews with tools is a lot more convenient than monitoring reviews manually, but that convenience comes at a price.
A few of the review monitoring tools I recommend include:
- BrightLocal – Pricing starts at $59/month for one location
- ReviewTrackers – Plans start at $89/month (paid annually) for one location
- Reviewflowz – Plans start at $45/month per review profile
Birdeye is another popular option, but prices start at around $200/month.
Brand24 is a great option as well, but it’s quite expensive since pricing for its review monitoring plan starts at $499/month.
Each tool does things differently, but they all allow you to monitor reviews from multiple platforms using a single dashboard.
BrightLocal, in particular, has an overview section that displays the total number of reviews you’ve received from all platforms and your overall review rating from all platforms.
It also includes breakdowns that showcase how many reviews you have per rating (5 stars, 4 stars, 3 stars, etc.) and per platform.
Most review monitoring tools also allow you to browse analytics and generate reports that give you deeper insights, such as which platforms perform better than others, how your reviews compare to your competitors and how customers feel about your business in general.
But the most useful feature these tools have to offer is the review inbox, a dashboard that combines reviews you’ve received from all of your connected platforms into one interface.
In short, monitoring reviews with tools mostly involves generating reports automatically and responding to reviews from a unified dashboard.
Deciding Which Review Platforms are Most Important
How you determine which review platforms are most important to your business should be dependent on two factors:
- Which platforms you receive most of your reviews from
- Which review platforms are most popular among consumers
Make a list of every review platform you manage, and arrange them in order from highest review count to lowest review count.
When you receive new reviews, you’re more likely to receive them on platforms at the top of your list. Consider prioritizing these platforms over others.
These are the most popular review platforms among consumers:
- Google – 83% of consumers read reviews on this platform
- Yelp – 44%
- Facebook – 40%
- Tripadvisor – 22%
- Better Business Bureau – 20%
- Apple Maps – 14%
- Trustpilot – 11%
- Angi – 8%
- Healthgrades – 7%
- Yellow Pages – 6%
Consider prioritizing the platforms at the top of this list as well.
Choosing a Schedule for Monitoring Your Reviews
The schedule you choose for monitoring your reviews will be dependent on how often you receive them, who manages your reviews and how elaborate your monitoring strategy is.
The more reviews you receive, the longer it’ll take to monitor them, especially if you decide to go the manual route.
I recommend choosing one of the following schedules:
- Twice a week – If you receive reviews daily
- Weekly – If you receive a moderate number of reviews a week
- Biweekly – If you receive a moderate number of reviews a month
- Monthly – If you receive a few reviews a month
Consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews promptly, so it’s best to at least check your review pages often even if you don’t plan on recording any metrics.
If you have an assistant or customer support staff, have them monitor your reviews so you can increase your schedule.
The 7-Step Checklist for Monitoring Online Reviews
Perform the following actions to monitor your reviews on each platform:
- Verify the review to make sure it’s real.
- Make note of when the review was published.
- Respond to the review.
- Take notes on customer feedback, including complaints and praises.
- Make note of the review’s overall sentiment.
- Make note of the review’s length.
- Make note of how many reviews included photos and how many photos customers left for your business.
Most review platforms do not allow you to remove reviews from your page yourself, so if you suspect a review is fake or written by a legitimate customer who’s making false claims, flag the review for removal, but respond to it and call it out as fake (respectfully) in case it doesn’t get removed.
Responding to reviews in general is very important and should always be part of your review marketing strategy whether you take the time to keep track of your metrics or not.
Related
And along with recording metrics in a spreadsheet or generating reports with a review monitoring tool, you should take the time to jot down a few notes about the complaints and praises your customers make about your business.
When you’re doing something right, keep doing it. Customers hate change, and if you make changes to something they’re praising you for, you risk losing them.
Take complaints seriously as well, even if customers are rude. Don’t let your pride get in the way of an opportunity to improve your products and services.
Spotting Trends in Customer Reviews
It’s okay to withhold from taking action if only a few customers complain about something, especially if their complaints are minor.
However, once praises and complaints start to increase, they become trends among your customer base. At this point, you can expect a good portion of your customer base to share these sentiments.
Taking notes and recording metrics will help you spot trends.
If you use a review monitoring tool, see if it has features that allow you to pinpoint trends and other consistencies in your reviews.
You can also use Google’s Gemini chatbot to generate a summary about your review score (on Google) using the following script:
“What do customers have to say about [business name] on [street name] in [city name]?”
or simply:
“What do customers have to say about [business name] in [city name]?”
Here’s an example using King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City:
“What do customers have to say about King’s English Bookshop on S 1500 E in Salt Lake City?”
Monitoring Off-Platform Reviews
Use Google Alerts and social listening tools to monitor off-platform reviews as well.
These are reviews customers write for your business on social media, forums and blogs.
Thank customers for leaving reviews on these platforms, and share a few insights into things they mention.
You might even be able to establish new influencer partnerships.
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