Local Club enables you to monitor your reviews and ratings from multiple sites in real-time through a single platform. To offer a comprehensive view of customer sentiment, Local Club calculates businesses' overall ratings from various sites, normalizing several factors in the process.
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Reasons for the difference in review count
If you notice a difference in review counts between reviews on Local Club and the review source, it could be due to a variety of reasons listed below:
- Duplicate Reviews: Some sites display duplicate reviews. Local Club does not aggregate these duplicate reviews.
- Inorganic Reviews: Reviews that are not written directly on the review site on which they are displayed are known as 'Inorganic reviews' on Local Club. Since inorganic reviews are already being aggregated from a different review source, they are not further aggregated on Local Club.
For example, below you can see that reviews written on 'Citysearch' are showing up on 'YP' review site. Birdeye will aggregate reviews that are written 'organically' on 'YP' but not the ones written on 'Citysearch' and showing up on 'YP’
- Deleted Reviews: These are reviews that were deleted by the reviewer or removed by the review site due to policy violations. To find out why reviews get removed, read Google’s contribution policies and Facebook Community Standards.
- Reviews Pending Approval or Verification: In an effort to prevent fraud, some sites select users at random to verify their email address before their review can be published. As a result, the review count displayed on the review site can differ from the actual number of reviews received.
- Review Site Changes: Sometimes, when a site undergoes changes or updates, it can affect our aggregation process, which results in failed aggregations or varying review counts. Local Club's auto-detection mechanism runs a nightly scan to identify any inconsistencies and fix them within 48 hours.
Reasons for the difference in ratings
Each website has its own algorithms for calculating ratings, which may result in a difference in ratings between Local Club and the review site. Below are some commonly used methods:
- Ratings based only on recent reviews To improve accuracy, some sites only factor in reviews posted within the last 12 months when calculating ratings. Ratings on the graph, therefore, account only for the current year.
Overall star ratings below the graph seemingly are a rounded-off number of the ratings from the reviews. Here is an example from a live account on Local Club:
Total Reviews: 167
Breakdown:
5 star: 62
4 star: 4
3 star: 6
2 star: 14
1 star: 79
Total: 167
Rating on Local Club: 2.7 star (This is calculated based on the average of the above reviews)
Current rating displayed on HomeWarrantyReviews for the same business: 4.0
“Overall rating” on HomeWarrantyReviews: 3.0
Reason for the difference: In the graph below from HomeWarrantyReviews, the overall rating has been rounded up from 2.7 to 3 stars. The 4-star rating accounts for reviews received within the current 12-month period.
- Use of different rating scales - Different review sites may have different rating scales that could affect the ratings you see on Local Club.
- Some sites use an editorial rating system where customers use a scale such as 1-10 to rate businesses on certain predefined categories. Since these editorial ratings are not related to review ratings, Local Club does not aggregate them.
- Some sites allow ratings with increments of 0.5, while others allow round number ratings only. (Example: 4.5 stars vs. 5 stars)
- Some sites allow a 'No rating' or '0' rating option, and include these when calculating average rating. Local Club does not factor in reviews with 'No rating' or '0' rating.
- Proprietary algorithms - Some sites have their own unique algorithm to calculate ratings, and precisely what factors they use when calculating average ratings is unknown to the public.
How Local Club calculates ratings - Local Club calculates ratings using the average formula to normalize ratings across all the reviews aggregated within Local Club from various sources.
Local Club does not include ‘No Rating’ reviews while calculating this average.