How to understand Review Tracker (New Platform)

Review Tracker was previously called 'Review Insights' in our legacy platform. Your existing reports and their history carry over automatically, so there's nothing to set up again. To open it, select a location in the new platform, then click 'Review Tracker' in the left-hand menu, under 'Reviews'.

In this overview, we explain how to understand the results of your Review Tracker report in Reputation Manager (RM).

Once complete, Review Tracker will look like this:

At the top right of the page, you'll see the 'Settings' and 'Update data' buttons.

Clicking 'Settings' opens your report settings page, where you can change the schedule, the review sites being monitored and your email alerts. For now, this takes you to the legacy platform.

Clicking 'Update data' runs the report straight away, so you don't have to wait for the next scheduled run. Each manual update uses one of your plan's manual runs; if you have none left, an alert will notify you.

Under these buttons, 'Last updated' shows when the report was last updated.

2. Performance

This section shows how your ratings are spread and which sites your reviews come from. You can view these in either chart or table format.

At the top of this section, you'll see three filters:

Sources: choose one or more review sites.
Ratings: choose one or more ratings, including 'Recommended' and 'Not recommended'.
Time: choose 'Last 30 days', 'Last 3 months', 'Last 6 months', 'Last 12 months' or 'All time'.

You can select as many sources and ratings as you like, for example 'Google' and 'Trustpilot', or '1 star' and '2 star'. The number next to each option shows how many reviews it includes, and options with no reviews are greyed out.

The average rating changes with the source and time filters, but not the ratings filter. If it did, filtering to 1-star reviews would always give an average of 1, which wouldn't tell you anything. When a ratings filter is on, the average is labelled 'across all ratings'.

Once you've changed a filter, a 'Clear filters' button appears, which resets the section to its defaults.

a. Ratings

The 'Ratings' section shows your average star rating.

The average only includes reviews with a star rating (1 to 5). Facebook recommendations and reviews without a star rating are counted in your total number of reviews, but they're excluded from the average.

Under this, there's a breakdown by star rating, showing the number of reviews for each.

As Facebook reviews don't use star ratings (reviewers either recommend or don't recommend a business), these are shown separately under 'Facebook recommendations'.

b. Sources

The 'Sources' chart shows the number of review sources and how your reviews are split between them. The total number of reviews across the filtered sources is shown in the centre of the chart.

The legend lists each review site with its number of reviews. You can also hover over a segment of the chart to see its number of reviews.

To keep the chart readable, review sites with less than 2% of your reviews are grouped together as 'Other', as long as there are at least two of them.

c. Table

To see the same figures as tables, click the table icon at the top right of the section. Click the chart icon to switch back.

The 'Ratings' table shows the number of reviews and share for each star rating, plus 'Recommended' and 'Not recommended'.

The 'Sources' table shows the same for every review site being monitored, including any with 0 reviews.

Shares are a percentage of the reviews you've filtered to, so they always add up to 100%. The tables are handy if you want to copy figures into a client report.

3. Timeline

Scrolling down, you'll see the 'Timeline' section, which shows how your reviews change over time. It has three charts: 'Volume', 'Rating' and 'Sources', which all share the same filters. You can view these in either chart or table format.

Next to the 'All reviews' and 'New reviews' buttons, you'll see four drop-downs:

Sources: choose one or more review sites.
Ratings: choose one or more ratings, including 'Recommended' and 'Not recommended'.
Time: choose 'Last 30 days', 'Last 3 months', 'Last 6 months', 'Last 12 months' or 'All time'.
Groupings: choose how the chart groups time, either 'Weekly', 'Monthly', 'Quarterly' or 'Yearly'.

You'll only see the groupings that work for the time period you've chosen. For example, 'Last 12 months' offers 'Weekly', 'Monthly' and 'Quarterly', 'Last 30 days' is always shown week by week, and 'All time' offers 'Quarterly' or 'Yearly'.

Weeks run from Monday to Sunday, so the first and last week of a period can be part weeks. The timeline also starts each period at the beginning of its week, month or quarter, so its number of new reviews can be slightly higher than the 'Performance' section's for the same time period.

a. All reviews and New reviews

At the top left of the section, you'll see the 'All reviews' and 'New reviews' buttons. These change what the 'Volume' and 'Rating' charts show:

All reviews: the 'Volume' chart shows a running total of your reviews, and the 'Rating' chart shows your running average rating.

New reviews: the 'Volume' chart shows how many new reviews arrived in each period, and the 'Rating' chart shows the average rating of only the reviews left in that period.

Once you have a lot of reviews, the running average moves very slowly, as one bad month barely changes it. Clicking 'New reviews' shows how each period was rated on its own, so a bad month stands out.

b. Charts

Volume: This chart shows your number of reviews over time. The number of reviews is shown on the left-hand side, and the dates along the bottom. When 'All reviews' is selected, you can hover over a point to see how many reviews were new in that period too.

Rating: This chart shows your average star rating over time. If a period has no star-rated reviews, the line shows a gap rather than dropping to zero. Like the average in the 'Performance' section, this chart ignores the ratings filter.

Sources: This chart shows your reviews for each period as a stacked bar, split by review site, with the largest site at the bottom. Smaller review sites are grouped as 'Other' in the same way as the 'Performance' section.

c. Table

To see each chart as a table, click the table icon at the top right of the section. The tables show the oldest period first, with 10 periods per page.