The Best Tools for Monitoring Online Reviews

Managing online reviews is a necessity for both online and regular business. Left unchecked, negative reviews can ruin a company’s reputation and lead to declining sales.

Online reviews are just as impactful as personal recommendations. In fact, a 2014 BrightLocal study found that 88% of respondents trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations.

And a survey conducted by research firm Dimensional Research found that 90% of customers said online reviews influenced their buying decision. Consumers want to know that they can trust a business to deliver a positive experience before making a transaction.

Businesses with no visibility to what users are saying about their products and services risk an opportunity to protect their brand presence. You can be more reactive, defend against bad comments or even competitors posting fake reviews by monitoring what reviews are posted online about your business.

Once you start watching and listening, you will learn a great deal about your customers. As a business leader, you can also motivate your team to encourage positive reviews by monitoring them online. After all, what gets measured, gets done!

Luckily, you do not have to keep up with online reviews manually. There are many services available to streamline the process of monitoring your online reviews and be reactive either by addressing the negative review, ask satisfied customers to add positive reviews to balance the negative ones or simply establish a corrective action to correct the issues that are being publicly disclosed.

Business Review Sites

Below are examples of review sites ranked by industries.

All

• BBB Reviews
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• GlassDoor
• Google Play Store
• Google, Google My Business, Google Maps
• Indeed
• iOS App Store
• Trustpilot
• Yelp!

Auto

• CarGurus
• DealerRater
• Edmunds

Food & Restaurant

• Grubhub
• OpenTable
• Zomato

Health

• HealthGrades
• RateMDs
• Vitals
• WebMD
• Wellness.com
• Zocdoc

Travel

• Booking.com
• Expedia
• Travelocity
• TripAdvisor

Top services to monitor Online reviews

Ready to take control of your online reputation and be reactive when negative comments are made? Below are the five services for monitoring and managing your online reviews.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts allows you to set up notifications for your company name or other key phrases related to your business. Similarly, Google My Business has provision for customer reviews. You will, however, need to check in on each review individually, which can be cumbersome when managing several listings.

Key Features

• Individual and company mentions
• Exclude unwanted mentions (e.g. similar names of personnel or products)
• Ability to create multiple alerts and streamline via email inbox

Cons:

• Google Alerts will notify you of all mentions of your brand, not just reviews. This can make the process of tracking down reviews time-consuming as you will need to filter the noise.

2. Visualping

Visualping is a powerful yet simple tool for monitoring just about any part of any page. One of the most frequent business uses of Visualping is to keep an eye on online reviews. Visualping offers a basic free version, which comes with two free checks per day.

How to Track Online Reviews Using Visualping

• Step 1: Simply enter the URL of the online review page you want to monitor (e.g. Yelp page)
• Step 2: Select the area of the page you want to monitor
• Step 3: Select your preferred frequency of checks (e.g. weekly, daily, every 30 minutes, every hour, etc.).
• Step 4: Select your preferred change monitoring format (e.g. tiny change, visual compare, web compare, etc.)
• Step 5: Enter the email you would like to use to receive review alerts
• Step 6: Type in the name or label that would be associated with your review page
• Step 7: Confirm your email address and complete the sign-up process

Key Features

• Probably the easiest and most straightforward service
• Free, depending on the frequency of checks
• Allows you to monitor the sites where the reviews are posted, including those of your competitor!
• You receive a screenshot or a snippet of text of any new review via email
• The email will contain a link to the site where the review was posted for immediate action

Cons:

• The service strictly alerts you when a review is posted
• Lack of advanced features such as sentiment analysis, trends and rating aggregation

3. Reputology

For a more advanced review management system, especially if you are an agency or run a large company. Reputology might suit your needs depending on your budget. In addition to curating reviews from all over the web, the tool provides actionable insights to help you and your team make decisions. It also enables you to delegate issues to the relevant employees so they can act.

Key Features:

• Integrates with social media management platforms (e.g. Hootsuite)
• Customer sentiment analysis
• Team collaboration and delegation options

Cons:

• Reputology is priced at the high end, with costs ranging from $180 a month for the Professional package to $2,500 per month for the Enterprise package. See below for the cost breakdown:

  • Professional: $180 per month
  • Agency: $400 per month
  • Enterprise: $2,500 per month

4. Yext

Although widely used as an online business listings platform, Yext also tracks online reviews. Yext makes it possible to monitor and manage reviews across the web.

Key Features

• Review monitoring from Google, Facebook, Yelp and more
• Engage customers within the platform
• Automated notification and follow-up for incoming reviews

Cons:

• Yext costs might be prohibitive for most businesses, ranging between $500 to $1,000 per year for a single location tracked

5. EmpathIQ

For those in the health care business, EmpathIQ allows to monitor what discharged patients are saying about clinics and hospitals online. The platform helps doctors monitor 75+ websites where patients can leave a review. EmpathIQ provides a weekly snapshot, email alerts, as well as a system for gathering reviews.

Key Features

• Review generator with personalized link
• Listings connector includes 50+ directories
• Reviews automated and streamlined in a single location

Cons

• EmpathIQ only specializes in healthcare

Take Control of Your Online Reputation

With 80% of customers making decisions based on what customers are saying about a business online, reviews monitoring is essential to address bad reviews, learn from your customers and motivate your team to perform better.