Free Review Audit Template
Hey friend!
Wondering what’s my free Review Audit© Template?
Chapter 5 of The Review Cycle is all about harvesting insights from your online reviews. It’s the data analytics strategy. In this chapter, I talk about the process of “auditing” your reviews to learn what people like and dislike about your product or business.
You can use this template to analyze reviews on Glassdoor, Amazon, Tripadvisor or any review site.
To give you a headstart on this process, you can download my Review Audit© Template for free below. I’d recommend reading section 5.2 in The Review Cycle for more helpful info on learning how to make better products and experiences with review data.
Thanks for using my Review Audit© Template!
Matt R. Vance
Author, The Review Cycle
- READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE YOU BEGIN YOUR REVIEW AUDIT©:
- This template has been structured to help you reliably identify positive and negative experience drivers impacting your product or business.
- This template allows you to evaluate up to 5 product listings/review profiles. If your product is sold on only one site (for example, Amazon) you will only fill out information in the first section labeled: [ADD Profile/Listing 1]. If you your product is sold on two websites, you’ll use the first two sections [ADD Profile/Listing 1] and [ADD Profile/Listing 2]. This continues up to 5 possible profiles/listings where all formulas are already added to analyze your one product sold on 5 different websites. The same thing would be true if you’re reading reviews of your employer on Glassdoor, Indeed, and more. You’d use section 1 for Glassdoor reviews, section 2 for Indeed reviews, etc.
- Because of the immense variety of websites where your product/business could be reviewed, website names have not been added to these headers. You will need to add the names of the websites where your product is listed in the pink headers where it says: [ADD Profile/Listing #]. For bonus points, add hyperlinks to the respective profile/listing pages on the sites for quick navigation later on.
- Have this file open and the first review profile/listing open. You are now ready to begin reading reviews. Sort reviews by most recent or most helpful, whichever you prefer. (I like to sort by most recent.) Read at least 100 reviews per listing for reliable data. If your listing has many more reviews, just realize the more reviews you read, the more reliable your data will be. Also note, you may add the total number of reviews you read next to the Listing header, but that is not required for the formulas to work or to conduct a Review Audit©.
- As you read each individual review, record new labels for each topic mentioned from reviews in the “Mention Tags” column. Be thoughtful as you select your mention tags. Mention tags should describe the topic shared in the review and be as short as possible (1-3 words).
- Each time a specific topic is found in a review that is already added as a “Mention Tag”, you will add a tally either under “Positive Tallies” or “Negative Tallies” depending on the sentiment of the comment. Note that it is possible to find a negative mention in a positive review and vice versa. This process is about categorizing topics your customers share by sentiment, regardless of star rating.
- To give greater context to your tallying of topics, you can add quotes from the reviews either under the “Positive Quotes” or “Negative Quotes” section, depending on the sentiment of the comment. For example, if a customer review states: “The packaging is frustrating. It’s difficult to open.” you could add this exact quote from the review under “Negative Quotes” for the Mention Tag “Packaging”.
- As you repeat this review reading process for your additional profiles/listings using the provided sections, all composite scores for all profiles will be calculated for you in the “COMPOSITE TOTALS” section.
- After you’ve finished reading all your reviews on all product listings, you can then sort the mention tags by frequency. Go to the “COMPOSITE TOTALS” section. There, you can sort all mention tags by “Total Tallies”, “All Positive Tallies” or “All Negative Tallies”. Your top positive experience drivers are the mention tags with the most “All Positive Tallies”. Your top negative experience drivers are the mention tags with the most “All Negative Tallies”. Exploring this data as part of a Perception Matrix Analysis© will help you make informed decisions on how to improve your product, service and marketing. (Read about the Perception Matrix Analysis© in Chapter 5 of The Review Cycle.)
- Note that several comments have been added on many header cells to further help you navigate the spreadsheet.