Contents

2 Review Monitoring Tools for Tracking Bad Restaurant Reviews in Real Time

Published on April 27, 2023by Botster

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One negative review can destroy the longstanding reputation of your business in a couple of minutes! The only effective way to prevent this is to use online review monitoring software on a regular basis. Today I’ll show you how to track the worst restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor and on Google Maps.

However, restaurants are just an example - you can use the strategy described below to monitor reviews about any kind of business, be it car trade, IT, education, fashion, etc.

From this step-by-step guide you’ll learn:

How to track Google reviews
How to track TripAdvisor reviews
How to use review monitoring app combinations for checking your competitors’ client testimonials automatically

As a real-life example, we'll take a trip to Lowell, Massachusetts, and eat a juicy meat steak in Outback Steakhouse 🥩 Let’s track good and bad reviews about restaurant service in this popular location!

How to track Google reviews

Whenever people are frustrated with bad service, they use Google Maps as a shoulder to cry on. Hence, here is your core business: tracking reviews on Google Maps every day!

If you have a small café with just a few visitors and even fewer reviews, you can afford to check these reviews manually every day, and this isn’t going to take you much time. But what if you own a large restaurant chain with subsidiaries in numerous regions and with dozens of reviews pouring in every day? This is a great honor - and a great headache.

Delegate the task of big or small business review tracking to the Google Review Extractor! This online tool can export reviews about different places (including restaurants and other types of businesses) listed on Google Maps into a convenient spreadsheet that can be downloaded as a CSV, Excel or JSON file.

Let’s use the Google Review Extractor to export the reviews about Outback Steakhouse in Lowell, MA. A quick guide:

Create a free account on Botster (no credit card required):

Open the Google Review Extractor’s start page:

Name your job:

Specify the restaurant’s location:

Select how many reviews you need to scrape.

✌️ Money-saving lifehack: Before generously ticking the maximum number of reviews to scrape, check how many reviews are actually present on Google Maps. You can find the number of the reviews next to the yellow stars on the location’s page:

In Lowell, MA, restaurant reviews for Outback Steakhouse make up a total of 1317. To scrape all of them, it’s enough to tick ‘Up to 2000 reviews’ (there’s no need to tick ‘Max possible’ and pay the maximum sum):

Tick ‘Lowest rating first’.

That’s because in this article, we are targeting bad reviews for restaurant service. Depending on your needs, you can set the Google Review Extractor to sort the reviews by relevance, by publishing date, or by the highest rating.

Enter the name of your business together with its location (‘Outback Steakhouse in Lowell Massachusetts’) :

Set the schedule.

Tick the checkbox if you want the Google Review Extractor to send you bad restaurant service reviews on a regular basis:

Once you’ve ticked the checkbox, the available options will appear. You can set the Google Review Extractor to run:

every day
once a week
twice a week

For example, the Google Review Extractor can send you bad reviews for restaurant service (if any) every day at 7 am, giving you an opportunity to respond to them during your working day:

If no longer needed, this task can be stopped either manually or at a certain date specified in advance:

Tick ‘Deliver new items only’ if you want the Google Review Extractor to send you updates only. For example, if you set the bot to run every day and tick this checkbox, it will send you only the reviews published during the last 24 hours, with the negative reviews coming first. This is exactly what you need for effective customer review monitoring!

Select how you’d like the Google Review Extractor to notify you about the newly appearing bad restaurant service reviews:

…and start the bot!

Video tutorial on how to monitor online reviews on Google Maps

Watch me demonstrate how to extract reviews about any business from Google Maps:

Results: examples of bad restaurant reviews

Below you can see the results retrieved by the Google Review Extractor. First come the worst Google restaurant reviews (i.e. the ones that have only 1 star out of 5 in the ‘Rating’ column):

The resulting spreadsheet is large and doesn’t fit into one screenshot. The full list of the extracted data includes not only review texts and ratings but also the following details (see example results):

Keyword
Position
Review text
Reviewed at
Owner's answer
Profile name
Profile URL
Profile image URL
Rating
Reviews count
Photos count
Is local guide? (yes / no)

Tips on how to use the online review monitoring tool

Once launched, the Google Review Extractor will now send you poor Lowell restaurant reviews every day at 7 am. With getting such an alarm, monitoring reviews (consumer reports) will become much easier and better organized. Make sure to read them every day or delegate this task to a trustworthy manager.

If you’ve received the new reviews in the morning and they are all good, let it be a good beginning of a good working day!

If you’ve received the new reviews in the morning and they are negative, do the following:

Reply to each bad review in a polite manner. Express solidarity and share an intention to sort the issue.
Analyze the reviews carefully and decide what can be done to improve your service.

For example, if the customer has written:

💬 “The noodles were dry, steak tips were rubbery, just awful”,

ask your cook to opt for an alternative steak recipe.

And if various customers regularly write things like:

💬 “5 star to the waitress Ashley.
1 star for the food and the manager Jake.
Ashley our waitress was nice and polite
and has great customer service”,

think of reprimanding Jake and giving his monthly bonus to Ashley 😉

If you’ve recently started your business, my recommendation is as follows: especially in the first years, monitor reviews as often as possible. Don’t underestimate your clients’ opinions! Their critical comments help you grow 💪
Check further Google scraping tools that can help you automate other routine business tasks.

How to track the worst restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is yet another important source of customer reactions. Luckily enough, you can monitor customer reviews published on this website just as effectively as is the case with Google reviews monitoring. The automation tool that will perform this task for you is called the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor.

Here’s how to use it:

Open your restaurant’s page on TripAdvisor and copy the page URL:

Now open the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor’s start page.
Paste your restaurant’s TripAdvisor page URL:

Specify the language that the extracted reviews should be written in:

Select how many honest restaurant Lowell reviews you would like the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor to scrape.

✌️ Remember the money-saving lifehack shared above? It works for the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor, too. Before selecting the number of reviews to scrape, check how many reviews written in the target language are actually present on TripAdvisor. Scroll your restaurant’s TripAdvisor page down till the review section:

On TripAdvisor, Outback Steakhouse restaurant reviews (Lowell, MA) make up a total of 54, with only 50 of them being written in English, which is our target language. Not that much! To export all of the desired reviews, it’s enough to tick ‘Up to 60 reviews’:

Set the schedule.

You can set the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor to run:

every hour
every day
twice a day
once a week
twice a week

Let’s set it to run every day at 10 am.

Don’t forget to tick ‘Deliver new items only’ to receive updates only.
Launch the bot.

Video guide on monitoring online reviews on TripAdvisor

Watch the video walkthrough to understand how the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor works in detail:

Results: bad restaurant reviews - examples

The TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor has retrieved all 50 reviews written in English:

Here’s the full list of columns in the spreadsheet (see example results):

Object URL
Review rank
Title
Review URL
Rating
Author
Profile picture
Profile URL
Total profile reviews
Review text
Date of visit
Date of review
Review image URLs

Tips on monitoring reviews on TripAdvisor

Once you’ve launched this smart Internet monitoring software, reviews about your restaurant (or any other business) will be exported every day at 10 am. Even though the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor can’t sort reviews by rating, you can easily do it yourself in the table:

Sort the results from lowest to highest by ‘Rating’. Bad reviews examples for restaurant service (the ones rated 1, 2 or 3) will automatically move to the top of the table, making it easy for you to analyze them:

To read the newest negative reviews, sort the part of the table containing negative reviews (the ones rated 1, 2 or 3) descending by ‘Date of review’:

The latest negative reviews will automatically move to the top of the table.

Analyze the reviews and think what you can improve in your business.
Since restaurant business is often (though not always) closely connected with the hotel business, you may be interested to learn how to use the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor for the purpose of hospitality marketing automation.

How to monitor business reviews of your competitors

Once you’ve got the restaurant review monitoring task up and running, take a step forward and start tracking your competitors’ reviews. This will give you insights into your rivals’ strengths and weaknesses and will give you some ideas on how to outperform them. He who monitors reviews of his competitors is always ahead!

To achieve this, use a combination of 2 review trackers: business tools for Google Maps (2 bots) and business tools for TripAdvisor (2 bots).

How to monitor brand reviews of your competitors on Google Maps

The strategy involves two simple steps:

Step 1️⃣

Extract a full list of your branch competitors from Google Maps using the Google Maps Scraper. Enter a keyword with location (e.g. ‘restaurants in Lowell, Massachusetts’), and the bot will make up a list of all restaurants located there.

Find a detailed guide on how to launch the Google Maps Scraper in my post devoted to big and small business lead generation techniques.

Step 2️⃣

Export the reviews about these companies (and monitor them on a regular basis, if needed) using the Google Review Extractor.

Web monitoring reviews of your competitors on TripAdvisor

Use a combination of two TripAdvisor scrapers:

Step 1️⃣

Extract a full list of your branch competitors from TripAdvisor using the TripAdvisor Search Extractor. Enter one or more keywords (e.g. ‘restaurants, cafés, bars’), specify the location (e.g. ‘Lowell, Massachusetts’), and the bot will make up a list of all restaurants located there.

Read the full explanation of how to launch the TripAdvisor Search Extractor in my tutorial on how to get travel leads online.

Step 2️⃣

Export the reviews about the extracted restaurants (and track them systematically, if necessary) using the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor.

Pricing for business review monitoring

You’ll be surprised to learn that the Google Review Extractor and the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor are virtually free review monitoring tools! Just check their pricing (as of 2023):

Exporting 10 reviews about 1 business with the help of the Google Review Extractor will cost you 15 cents (25 cents for 100 reviews, 45 cents for 1000 reviews, etc.);
Extracting 30 reviews about 1 business using the TripAdvisor Reviews Extractor will cost you 5 cents (9 cents for 60 reviews, 12 cents for 100 reviews, 25 cents for 500 reviews, etc.).

While customer service is gradually turning into an independent industry, it’s time to make risk management, monitoring and review analysis your regular task - the more so if it can be so easily automated as described in this article.

I hope that with the two review monitoring services described above you’ll get some inspiration to improve and develop your business!