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Review portals: importance and benefits for consumers and companies

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Review portals are an integral part of every customer journey. That's why it's essential for companies to take a detailed look at review portals. Here you will find some suggestions.

What are rating portals or rating platforms and what is their purpose?

Review portals are online platforms that enable consumers to make public opinions and reviews (ratings) about products, companies or services. As a rule, individual rating platforms serve specific industries. Such as TripAdvisor for the tourism industry or Yelp for the catering and service industry. This will be discussed in more detail later in this article. On rating portals, it is common for opinions to be given in the form of standardized, quantitative ratings. Most of the time these are stars or scores. These quantitative evaluations are usually also justified by free text comments describing the brand or customer experience.

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Review portals have an opinion-forming function and significantly influence consumers' purchasing decisions. Consumers form an opinion about brands, products, services and companies based on the opinions of other consumers. The reviews therefore have a significant influence on consumer behavior.

Review portals as marketing tools

Review portals also have the aspect of a marketing tool. A good ranking on major review platforms can be a great help in customer acquisition. Consumers tend to choose the first visible ads, i.e. those that are particularly high in the ranking, as a possible purchase option, similar to Google, Amazon, and Ebay. That's why more and more companies are setting themselves the goal of collecting as many positive reviews as possible in Customer Experience Management in order to improve the ranking and thus be noticed by consumers as early as possible. The review portal Yelp.com was visited by around 2020 million unique users via mobile devices and a further 55 million unique desktop users in the third quarter of 43 (source: Statista).

These figures illustrate the importance of review portals for companies. And the resulting importance of ensuring positive customer experiences. In order to ultimately receive as many positive reviews as possible. The more positive this customer experience is, the more willing consumers are to reward these positive experiences with a positive rating in a review portal. The principle of the Net Promoter Score clearly illustrates this.

Always keep an eye on reviews about your company on review portals and social media platforms

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Importance of review portals

Importance of review portals for companies

For companies, rating portals are an important tool for quality management, measuring customer satisfaction and determining online reputation. Anonymously on the Internet, people are often inclined to write their opinions with less inhibition than if they asked their opinion face to face in a store. Rating portals help companies control and monitor their own reputation management. Because the external image of a company is extremely important for long-term customer loyalty. Reviews on review sites allow companies to identify potential areas for improvement and work to provide better customer experiences. Rating portals therefore ensure unvarnished and unfiltered customer feedback.

Importance of review portals for consumers

For consumers, review portals are useful resources for finding the best service, product and most popular brands as quickly and easily as possible. In reality, it looks like this: For example, you want to eat in a burger restaurant, you pull out your cell phone and search for a corresponding burger restaurant near your location in the Yelp app. Several corresponding restaurant offers are then displayed and consumers then decide which of these burger restaurants they should visit based on the reviews given by other consumers.

Importance of review portals

For consumers this means having found a restaurant that offers them the best possible customer experience and for the restaurant it means having found new guests. A real win-win situation.

10 important review portals at a glance

Google My Business

The Google My Business review portal provided by Google is one of the most important and significant platforms for product, brand, service and company reviews. It is easy to use, clear and particularly useful for small to medium-sized companies. This allows them to optimize their ranking in Google searches. According to SEO experts, the reviews influence the Google ranking. Not only is the higher ranking a clear plus point for the review portal Google My Business, but, as already mentioned above, positive reviews have a significant influence on the consumer's decision.

Google is an important element in almost every customer journey. No matter whether it is online shopping or a visit to a restaurant. There is now almost always at least one online touchpoint with the Google search engine, which is hardly surprising given that it has a market share of more than 90% among all search engines. The first thing that catches the eye of Google users is usually the reviews of the companies listed. And that's why Google My Business is so important, because it's where customers form their first opinion, and as we all know, that's one of the most important ones.

TripAdvisor

The company TripAdvisor, founded in 2000, is undoubtedly one of the most important and largest review portals for the tourism industry. It is also important to note that TripAdvisor is primarily a comparison portal through which you can book hotels, experiences and restaurants. With almost 900 million reviews, more than 9 million establishments have been rated so far. In 2019, around 460 million unique users visited TripAdvisor every month. Based on the key figures mentioned, you can see that this rating and comparison portal offers huge marketing potential for companies. Precisely because of TripAdvisor's specialization, every company in the tourism industry is well advised to position itself as well as possible and be rated positively. Not just in terms of ranking in search results, but also in terms of quality and reputation management.

On average, businesses have around 100 reviews on TripAdvisor. The large hotel and restaurant chains in particular have several hundred reviews per location, and of course they are not exclusively positive. It is important not to simply leave negative reviews uncommented or not to draw any conclusions from them because you do not consider them important. Firstly, you could lose customers who have had negative experiences to other locations. Furthermore, all reviews are important in order to optimize your offers, especially if you are pursuing a high-price strategy or the market is highly competitive. In addition, companies should ALWAYS respond to negative criticism in order to signal to customers that they take their reviews first and definitely want to keep them. Due to the high number of users and importance of the TripAdvisor rating platform and the arguments mentioned, companies in the tourism industry should promote good quality and reputation management here.

Yelp

The review portal Yelp was founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. Around 200 million reviews and 16 years later, Yelp is one of the top rating platforms when it comes to reviews and ratings in the catering sector. In contrast to TripAdvisor, Yelp is less industry-specific. On Yelp you have the opportunity to rate almost every service. The structure of the review portal is somewhat reminiscent of a social network. Yelp offers its users the opportunity to share and like; users can interact more with each other on Yelp than is the case with other rating portals.

Reputation and ratings therefore spread more quickly; this applies to both positive and negative reviews. Yelp's business model is purely focused on advertising revenue; companies pay money to advertise on Yelp. This is where reputation and quality management is extremely important. Due to the faster spread of reputation, the viewability of reviews is significantly higher than on other review platforms. That's why you should focus even more on addressing negative comments immediately in order to possibly improve the review.

kununu

Kununu is a review platform where employees can rate companies. This review is publicly available and provides a potential new employee with the opportunity to learn more about the company. According to the company's own information, almost 965.000 companies have been rated with 4,5 million reviews on the Kununu rating portal. Employees can rate the company based on 13 characteristics in 4 categories. Applicants are also able to evaluate the application process. Kununu has become a confidential source in the DACH region when it comes to publicly available employee feedback. The goal of Kununu is for everyone to find the right company for them. And vice versa, every company has the right talent. Of course, Kununu also offers companies the opportunity to respond to reviews and create an employer branding profile.

Rated.de

Beortet.de is a rating platform that aims to bring service providers and customers together. You can quickly and easily search for and ultimately evaluate services of all kinds. Beortet.de is a very good place to start if you are looking for very specific services that can be easily found using an autofill search. In contrast to many other review platforms, the review portal is not industry-specific. Services are predominantly evaluated here. At Beortet.de, predominantly small and medium-sized companies are evaluated, which often have difficulty with professional search engine optimization (SEO). Bewertet.de – and of course other review portals – help these companies to be found. On the consumer's side, the added value of Bewertet.de lies in the fact that the portal clearly displays the best-rated offers from a search in a region.

G2

The G2 rating portal is better known in specialist circles and among technology companies, as G2 specializes exclusively in software. The market for software and web applications of all kinds is so huge and therefore confusing, so G2 is a very useful platform to find out about customer experiences in this area before deciding to purchase or license software. That's why G2 is one of the best-known B2B marketplaces in the world. Review platforms have a significant impact on companies’ marketing and sales. That's why companies should take their presence here particularly seriously and seize the opportunity to generate leads and increase sales through as many positive reviews as possible.

Facebook

Are you surprised that Facebook is listed here? Of course, Facebook is not a review portal in the truest sense, but primarily a social network. But Facebook also offers users to rate products, services and brands on the so-called company pages. When talking about Facebook, the number of users should not go unmentioned. Facebook has 1,9 billion users, 342 million of them in Europe alone. This is one of the reasons why Facebook is an indispensable marketing tool for companies. A company that has a company page on Facebook can be rated by Facebook members. Depending on the presence and popularity of the company, the visibility of these company pages and thus also that of the ratings fluctuates, but due to the high number of users, one can still assume that the visibility is similar to that on classic rating portals. And ultimately, as a company you can also book advertisements via Facebook, which significantly increases visibility.

Trustpilot Reviews Buy

Trustpilot is certainly one of the most important review portals in the world. Trustpilot is also one of the top 1% most popular websites worldwide. It's no wonder that Trustpilot has become an integral part of many a customer journey. When you think of a customer journey, you probably think of the usual touchpoints such as Google search, social media, TV, radio, etc. On average, a customer often has more than 20 touchpoints before a product is purchased. And each of these touchpoints has an influence on whether customers decide to make a purchase. A good 4 million reviews are submitted every month on Trustpilot. This means that the likelihood of a potential customer stumbling across a review of your business on Trustpilot is very likely. Trustpilot also offers companies services such as getting more reviews and therefore higher visibility on this important review portal. This should help create greater trust among consumers.

Trusted shops

Trusted Shops probably has the most well-known seal in the world of e-commerce. With its Trusted Shops seal, the rating portal guarantees that a company that receives this award is a safe provider. Trusted Shops attaches great importance to ensuring that reviews are authentic and not fictitious. Test analysis and artificial intelligence ensure that suspicious reviews are identified and deleted accordingly. This has the advantage that consumers have a high level of trust in the reviews and can be sure that they are not unfair entries. On the one hand, Trusted Shop fulfills the purpose of a review portal, and on the other hand, it is also a company that ensures the security of the want to ensure the consumer when shopping online or in e-commerce.

golocal

As the name suggests, golocal is a review platform that aims to make it as easy as possible for consumers to find local service providers. In addition, the review portal, similar to Yelp, offers the opportunity to connect with other users via a forum and exchange ideas. For companies, Golocal offers a widget that can be integrated into their own website, from which consumers can access the reviews on golocal in order to find out more about the company and to write reviews about their experiences themselves.

Always keep an eye on review portals

Review portals are very important for companies because they are real opinion makers with millions of users and are therefore integrated into the customer journey. The great marketing and sales potential that companies with a particularly large number of good reviews have is of course the main reason why companies should take review portals very seriously. Review portals are also extremely important for quality and reputation management, as this has a direct impact on sales. Good reputation management can ensure that consumers retain long-term loyalty to companies and recommend products, brands and services. Quality management should be one of the most important topics in the company, and rating portals are also a valuable source of feedback for this.

Companies should therefore take review portals very seriously. And also provide human resources to monitor them and respond immediately to negative reviews. QuestionPro is the perfect solution for this. With the web app for online reputation management, you always have an overview of all important review portals on a single user interface and can respond to reviews directly from the app without having to constantly log into each individual review portal and laboriously navigate through the reviews .

→ Information about the reputation management app from QuestionPro

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