How to track Google reviews (and why you should track them)

how to track google reviews (and rhy you should)

"What can't be tracked can't be improved" is a famous business management quote that emphasizes the importance of monitoring key metrics to achieve success.

When it comes to online reputation management, tracking your Google reviews is essential to improving your business's reputation and attracting new customers.

By understanding your current rating score and identifying areas for improvement, you can take action to get more reviews and improve your overall online reputation. So don't let your reviews go untracked - start using LOCALBOSS today to take control of your online reputation and grow your business!

How to track my Google Reviews

Not one, but 5 ways to do it although the first one can't be considered tracking.

1 Directly in Google

The Google Business Profile never gave too much insights about our reviews, and now that they are closing the Google My Business app and making us switch to Search or Maps, it’s no different.

Recommended for: Business owners who don’t care about their reputation and getting more customers in Google.

2 The good'ol spreadsheet

Next step, tracking manually the score in a spreadsheet or excel. Believe me, I’ve done it for years. It’s a nightmare and prone to errors. Plus you’ll need formulas or star rating calculators or formulas to get the Real Score. If you want to do it this way, check this post to get the specific ratings.

Another problem is that you don’t have your historical data (Google tells you what your score you have today, not last week or last year), so if you choose to do it manually, you better get started now.

Recommended for: Local business owners with a lot of free time to kill and looking to learn excel.

3 With LOCALBOSS (it does it all for you)

If you are a local business owner who wants to track its reviews and you don’t have a marketing team and, honestly, you don’t have time to deal with all that stuff… Hey! We built an app exactly for you!

Recommended for: Small business owners like restaurants bars and shops who mostly run their businesses from their phones and don’t have time to deal with BS: if you need to get to the point, fast and simple, Localboss is for you.

With Localboss you can track your local business reviews, and then some more. You’ll get immediately all your historical data since the first review you ever got, and get access to data like “how many reviews I need to progress” and a bunch of free tools to get more reviews.

The best part: you don’t need to be a Local SEO expert to get the review scores you always dreamed of!

Download it now, it's free!

4 Local channel manager / Local reviews manager software

Another option is to use a software that will connect to your Google Business Profile account and manage all your locations from one place. They are huge, kind of complicated, and you have to go through their sales process. They are great, of course, but they are made for very large companies, so they charge between 80$ and 400$ per month, per location.

They are designed for Hotel Chains, big retailers, large restaurant chains and so on, with teams of data analysts to monitor and report every single detail.

In exchange they allow you to manage all your locations in pretty much every platform available, no only Google (Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, etc).

There are dozens of them but none offers the level of detailed insight that LOCALBOSS offers. It’s a classic tradeoff of quantity over quality.

Recommended for: Large chains and companies with hundreds of locations and a large marketing team. If that’s your business, they are a must have!

5 Create your own tracker

Yes, you can access your location data via de API. Not impossible, but (we guarantee you) not something that you want to do if you want to go fast and have always the best features. To know more about how to access the API and create your own solution click here. The API is free but it has some limitations, for example, you can’t store user reviews for more than 30 days.

Recommended for: Startups who are highly tech savvy and they have a strong data platform that they want to integrate with.

The 4 KPIs any local business owner should be tracking

Your Real Rating

This is the single most KPI you need to track. The rating (or score) that you see is obviously a round up number to 1 decimal. What two, hree or four decimals hid is where the sauce is. Here you have everything you need to know about the real rating.

Number of reviews

(weekly, monthly and yearly)
Once you know your real rating… write it down! At least monthly, but depending on how many reviews your business gets you should track it daily too.

Partial Rating

(weekly, monthly and yearly)
Partial rating is the score that you get in a period of time, normally a month. It’s the “partial” score that you had during that period, and can be way higher (or lower) than the current Real Rating, indicating that something change suddenly in your business.

Number of reviews

Do you know how many reviews your local business gets a week? A month? If the answer is no, you can’t know if your team has suddenly stoped asking for them, or if the new QR or email is working or not.