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INTRODUCTION

CONCLUSION

Google reviews continue to play a dominant role in the buying decisions of consumers who interact with businesses of all kinds at the local level. Reviews also exert an important influence on search rankings, with higher review counts and star ratings leading to more prominent placement 
in search results. Though the volume of new Google reviews has diminished, in part due to the pandemic and in part due to alternative forms of recommendation via social media, reviews remain the largest and most valuable source of consumer recommendations, and one of the most powerful determinants of ranking and conversion, for all types of businesses. 

However, Google reviews have lost some of their inherent value to consumers in recent years as ratings have become inflated toward the positive, partially due to aggressive solicitation of new reviews on Google’s part. Google reviews are also much more likely than any other local review source 
to contain a rating but no text, offering less information to consumers looking to evaluate the differences between businesses. 

Still, reviews exert a powerful influence on that evaluation process. Higher ratings and a greater volume of reviews both increase the likelihood that consumers will choose a business over the competition. Similarly, when businesses respond to reviews, they increase their favorability in the eyes of consumers and become more likely to convert searchers into customers. 

The opportunities and challenges of review management differ somewhat by industry. 

• Some industries, like department stores and restaurants, generate a great number of reviews with little effort.

• Other industries, such as insurance and pharmacy, see a much lower volume of reviews from consumers. 

• Consumers are more likely to rate businesses highly in some industries like moving & storage and home & office services. 

• Consumers write longer reviews for healthcare and hotels than any other industry. 

Marketers need to understand review trends overall, the power of reviews and review response to influence consumer buying decisions, 
and the specific trends for reviews in their industries in order to execute successful review management strategies and win more customers.

Review Length by Industry

Notably, the industry with the lowest average rating also has the greatest average length of reviews, suggesting that healthcare consumers have a lot 
to say about their not-so-stellar experiences! Average review length ranges from 242 characters for a healthcare review — which is nearly 55 percent longer than the next ranked industry — to an average of just 56 characters per review for department stores.

Average Rating Subject to Inflation

Google reviews skew positively compared to other local platforms. SOCi's Localized Marketing Benchmark Report data shows the average rating of a business on Google is a full 1.0 star higher than on Yelp, with both using a five-star scale. As of July 2022, the average business on Google has a rating of 4.11 stars. At the start of the historical range covered in this report, January 2015, the average business was rated 3.74 stars. Ratings have increased by roughly 10 percent over the past seven years, likely due to Google's aggressive solicitation of reviews from Local Guides and Google Maps users, along with the company's comparatively lax review moderation policies.

Reviews with Text Less Common over Time

Google is one of the few local platforms that permits a rating with no corresponding review text. Some 52.4 percent of all Google reviews in this dataset had no text at all. In May 2015, Google reviews with text reached a high of 76.2 percent; that fell to just 39.4 percent of new reviews at the lowest point, in May 2020. From 2015 to the time of this report, reviews with text declined by 28 percent overall, though no-text reviews have become slightly less common since their May 2020 low.

HIGH-LEVEL TRENDS IN GOOGLE REVIEWS

Review Volume Growth Has Plateaued

Influence of Review Volume on Conversion

We plotted conversion rate against month-by-month increases in star rating, focusing on increments between 0.1 and 1 star. An increase of one full star, for example from 3.0 to 4.0, corresponds with a 44 percent increase in conversions. Each tenth of a star increases conversion rate by roughly 4.4 percent.

THE POWER OF GOOGLE REVIEWS

Reviews influence the ranking of Google Business Profiles in both Google Search and Google Maps, and positive reviews likely influence conversion as well. For this analysis, conversion is defined as the proportion of actions to searches: the share of search appearances that result in a conversion-oriented action such as a phone call, website click, or request for directions. Overall, Google profiles convert at a standard rate of 2.3 percent.

Influence of Star Rating on Conversion

Influence of Review Response on Conversion

Responding to reviews is one of the few review-related factors a business can directly control, and consumers are more likely to overlook a negative review when it has received an adequate response. Responding to 100 percent of reviews, versus none, increases conversion rates by 16.4 percent. Every 25 percent of reviews responded to improves conversion by roughly 4.1 percent, though the benefit trails off somewhat after a business has responded to about 67 percent of its reviews.

Review Response by Industry

Businesses responded to reviews in only 11 of the 16 industries surveyed, about 69 percent. The industries with the highest response rates were automotive, cosmetics and skincare, insurance, moving and storage, and hardware and home improvement. Industries where review response remains a greenfield opportunity include sporting goods, grocery, craft stores, discount stores, and gas and convenience.

REVIEW RESPONSE TRENDS

The general historical trend shows that businesses are responding to more reviews now than they did a few years ago, though the peaks and valleys in this trend chart are interesting, and worth making a note of. 

The highest rate of responses to new reviews was reached in February 2020, just before Google shut down review functionality in the early days of the pandemic. Another peak was reached in February of 2021, and a third, though more modest, in February of 2022. 

Surprisingly, the data suggests that businesses respond to more reviews in the winter months than they do in the summer. Though response rates in this dataset remain low in comparison with other trends — in the 2022 LMBR, for instance, we found that the average business responds to 36.2 percent of its reviews, whereas here, the highest response percentage for 2022 is a mere 5.4 percent — still, the trends suggest that response rates have grown. In July 2022, businesses responded to 41.5 percent more reviews than in July 2021, 61.3 percent more reviews than in July 2020, and 219 percent more than in July 2018. Note, July 2019 is an anomaly; response rates in that month were 18 percent higher than in July 2022.

Review Response Rates over Time

Review Response by Star Rating

When we looked at review responses by star rating, we discovered that businesses overall are responding more frequently to their 5 star reviews, more than any other type. Responses to a business' 1-star reviews comes in second. 

The highest response percentage in our study was 23.4 percent for reviews with a rating of 5 stars, followed by responses to 1-star reviews at 8.6 percent, 4-star reviews at 4.6 percent, 2-star reviews at 3.3 percent, and 3-star reviews at just 2.0 percent. Here, we examined all historical reviews, so the percentages may not reflect cases where businesses are responding to a higher proportion of their more recent reviews. 

Average Ratings by Industry

When ranking industries by the average star rating for each, we came across a few surprises. While we might have expected categories associated with leisure time, such as restaurants and hotels, to be ranked towards the top, the rankings showed service professions taking the top three positions with restaurants and hotels occupying 8th and 14th place out of 18 respectively. The top five industries by average star rating are moving & storage, home & office services, cosmetics & skincare, hardware & home improvement, and grocery. 

These industries would appear to be the most-loved verticals amongst U.S. consumers. The lowest five are hotels, banking & finance, automotive, pharmacy, and healthcare. These results are according to the overall average rating of each location in our data as of July 2022. The range represented by these averages is significant, with moving & storage coming in at 4.84 stars while healthcare averages at just 3.06 stars.

REVIEW TRENDS BY INDUSTRY

High review volumes can have a major impact on a company’s review management strategy, especially for multi-location brands in industries where each location generates a large number of reviews. While on the positive side, creating a large repository of information to mine for consumer sentiment trends, large review volumes present a challenge in keeping up with the daily task of responding to every review. According to our analysis, department stores have the greatest number of reviews of any vertical, followed by restaurants and home & office services. Hotels and grocery round out the top five. The industries receiving the least number of reviews are, in order, cosmetics & skincare, pharmacy, insurance, healthcare, and automotive.

Review Volume by Industry

ABOUT THE DATA

53

Total Number of Brands

31,326

Total Number of Locations

Total Number of Industries

18

Total Number of Responses

545,371

Total Number of Reviews

4,936,814

Google is by far the most popular platform today for searches of all kinds, including searches for local businesses. Consumers choose Google more than twice as often as any other platform when looking for local business information online. SOCi research has shown that top-ranked businesses in Google local searches earn significant advantages over the competition: businesses ranked 1 to 3 in local results, those who win placement in Google's 3-Pack, earn 126 percent more consumer traffic and 93 percent more conversion-oriented actions than businesses ranked further down.
Review factors such as overall star rating, count of reviews, and keywords in review text play a significant role in search ranking. Reviews are also the single most important criteria in consumers' minds for differentiating one business from another, with 89 percent of consumers saying they read online reviews before making a purchase decision.

Review factors such as overall star rating, count of reviews, and keywords in review text play a significant role in search ranking. What’s more, reviews are the single most important criteria in consumers’ minds for differentiating one business from another, with 89 percent of consumers saying they read online reviews before making a purchase decision. 

This report digs into the detail behind these high-level findings: how Google reviews impact conversion by industry, and recent historical trends in Google reviews that indicate what the future may hold.

Our analysis used a dataset of 31,326 Google profiles for a selection of multi-location brands managed by SOCi, with historical data on 4.9 million total reviews going back to 2007. We focused on 2015 to present, since this is the period when Google reviews came to dominate the reputation management space for local businesses. The analysis includes brands across 18 B2C industries.

Businesses ranked 1 to 3 in local results — those who win placement in Google’s 3-Pack — earn 126 percent more consumer traffic and 93 percent more conversion-oriented actions than businesses ranked further down.

Review volume on Google peaked in August 2019, with the average business receiving 13.1 new reviews that month. Google shut reviews down during the early months of COVID, reflected in the sharp drop between February and April 2020. Growth in review volume peaked again in July 2021, then decreased gradually in the months since. As of July 2022, the average business generated only 5.8 new reviews per month, a 56 percent dropoff from pre-pandemic peaks. This may reflect a turn in consumer attention toward social platforms like Instagram and TikTok as sources for loca

For an in-depth discussion of how to respond to reviews, read our 
Multi-Location Marketer’s Guide to Online Reputation Management.

To produce the findings in this report, we gathered Google reviews and associated data from businesses in 18 industries, focusing on the period from January 1, 2015 to July 31, 2022. We performed time-based evaluations to uncover trends in data points like review count and star rating, as well as all-time counts of star rating by industry and other metrics. 

To determine correlations between conversion rate and star rating, conversion rate and review count, and conversion rate and review response rate, we created scatter plots and then performed linear regression analysis using the ordinary least squares (OLS) method.

Conversions of Google profiles improves by 44 percent when a business increases its average rating by one full star — for instance from 3.0 to 4.0. Every tenth of a star increase improves conversion by 4.4 percent.

The State of Google Reviews

Though Google publishes approximately 78 percent of all local reviews, 
the volume of new reviews on Google decreased significantly during 
the pandemic and has not recovered. On average, businesses earn 
56 percent fewer new reviews per month in 2022 than they did in 2019.

Google star ratings have become inflated over time. In 2015, the average business had a rating of 3.74 stars, whereas the current average is 4.11 stars.

Google reviews with a star rating, but no text, have become more common over the years. In 2015, 76.2 percent of Google reviews included text; today, the percentage is just 54.2 percent. 

Consumers are also more likely to choose a business with a greater number of reviews. For every 10 new reviews earned, conversion of Google profiles improves by 2.8 percent.

Consumers prefer businesses that respond to reviews. For every 25 percent of reviews responded to, conversion of Google profiles improves by 4.1 percent. Responding to 100 percent of reviews, as opposed to none, boosts conversion by 16.4 percent.

Businesses, on the whole, respond to a greater proportion of very positive or very negative reviews (either 5 stars or 1 star) than they do reviews in the middle range (2, 3, or 4 stars).

Interactive Chart Tip: Use the time selector buttons, at the top left of the graph, to narrow the graph results to a specific time frame. Use this date selector slider, at the bottom of the graph, to narrow and navigate the graph results.

Interactive Chart Tip: Use the time selector buttons, at the top left of the graph, to narrow the graph results to a specific time frame. Use this date selector slider, at the bottom of the graph, to narrow and navigate the graph results.

The State of Google Reviews FAQ

What is the average star rating for Google Business Profiles?
The average Google Business Profile rating is 4.11 stars, up from 3.74 stars in 2015, an increase of roughly 10 percent over seven years.

Why are Google ratings higher than ratings on other platforms?
Google's average rating runs about a full star higher than Yelp's on the same five-star scale. This is largely due to Google's active solicitation of reviews from Local Guides and comparatively looser review moderation.

How much does a one-star increase affect conversions?
Businesses that raise their average rating by one full star, for example from 3.0 to 4.0, see a 44 percent increase in conversion-oriented actions like calls, website clicks, and direction requests.

Do most Google reviews include written feedback?
No. More than half of all Google reviews in this dataset, 52.4 percent, are ratings-only with no text, and that share has grown over time.

How often should businesses respond to Google reviews?
Businesses that respond to 100 percent of their reviews see a 16.4 percent lift in conversions compared to responding to none. Every 25 percent of reviews responded to adds roughly another 4.1 percent.