Word-of-mouth has always been an effective marketing strategy. Now the conversation is taking place online and businesses need to keep up. This is where a stable and consolidated flow of reviews data comes in handy. Whether you are a business owner looking to incorporate customer feedback into your in-house tool, or a software company planning to build upon review data, this article will help you understand the following points:
- Scraping reviews vs getting reviews with API
- Supported reviews data sources in DataforSEO API
- The cost of getting reviews and ratings with DataForSEO API
- Why do you need reviews and ratings data?
- Enrich a social listening tool with customer feedback
- Launch a website review widget
- How to integrate reviews API into your platform?
Scraping reviews vs getting reviews with API
Put simply, review scraping is the process of collecting data on reviews from the webpages’ source code using web crawlers or spiders. Once the data is fetched, it has to be structured and saved in data storage before you can access the extracted data using your tool.
At the same time, reviews API is a type of software interface that connects your application directly to the normalized and structured reviews data. While API should only be integrated, and you’ll get a data supply, web scraping involves much more technical overhead.
If you devise a web scraping infrastructure on your own, you’ll have to deal with proxy pool management, reCaptcha solvers, headless browsers, scalability, and more. Overall, investing in a review scraper development and maintenance requires tremendous effort and financial resources.
In contrast, integrating an API is much simpler and a lot more cost-efficient than building review scrapers. With API, you’ll get a flexible and scalable way to extract online reviews data.
However, the cost of reviews APIs available in the market varies significantly. So, before paying for a service, we recommend carefully checking its pricing, comparing the offering across several data providers, and of course, trying out the reviews API you’re considering.
At DataForSEO, we offer a free unlimited trial of our APIs and a free Sandbox feature for testing and configuring the product. We’ll tell you more about DataForSEO’s services in the next part.
Supported reviews data sources in DataforSEO API
DataForSEO is committed to empowering businesses with valuable data by providing cost-efficient and easy-to-use APIs. Reviews data in particular is an essential part of our offering.
We have a robust Business Data Reviews API that supplies reviews and ratings from the largest customer feedback sources on the web. Review details you can get include the review’s text, star rating, time of submission, reviewer info, owner’s response, attached images, and more.
Besides that, we offer Amazon Reviews in our Merchant API suite.
Below, we’ll give you a bit of detail on the supported review platforms and provide response samples from related API endpoints.
1. Goggle is the most popular directory where people search for different places and local services, as well as read and leave reviews. For business owners, this makes Google an important source of customer feedback.
In DataForSEO Google Reviews API, you can get reviews by specifying a business name, cid, or place ID. You can also sort the results by most relevant or newest reviews, and highest or lowest rating.
DataForSEO API — Google Reviews Response Sample
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
2. Yelp is a highly trusted source of reviews and ratings for local businesses. It focuses on long-form reviews and keeps spam and ads at a minimum.
To get reviews published on Yelp with DataForSEO Yelp Reviews API, you should indicate an alias (unique business identifier on Yelp) or a business name. You can sort the results by elite Yelp users, most relevant or newest reviews, and highest or lowest rating.
DataForSEO API — Yelp Reviews Response Sample
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
3. Trustpilot is a leading review website that hosts consumer opinions on businesses and service providers from around the world.
To obtain Trustpilot Reviews with DataForSEO, specify a domain of the local establishment from the business’s URL on Trustpilot.
DataForSEO API — Trustpilot Reviews Response Sample
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
4. Tripadvisor offers an immense amount of client feedback on hotels, restaurants, and tourist spots, as it is the largest travel platform on the web.
To collect reviews from Tripadvisor with DataForSEO API, input a url_path (a part of the URL pointing to a specific business entity).
DataForSEO API — Tripadvisor Reviews Response Sample
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
We can also provide you with data on businesses appearing on Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, and Tripadvosr Search for a certain keyword. All Reviews endpoints in DataForSEO Business Data API have parallel Search endpoints which supply a list of businesses with business names, images, Place IDs and other platform-specific identifiers, and more. See our Business Data API documentation to learn more.
5. Amazon omarketplace is the world’s largest online retail platform which offers a treasure trove of feedback data from millions of online buyers.
To collect reviews from Amazon with DataForSEO API, you should specify a unique product identifier (ASIN) which you can receive by making a separate request to the Amazon Products endpoint.
DataForSEO API — Amazon Response Sample
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
The cost to getting reviews and ratings with API from DataForSEO
DataforSEO offers one of the most affordable and reliable review collection APIs in the market. While the majority of review data providers offer quite pricey monthly packages with a bit tricky credit system, the cost of reviews in DataForSEO API is simply dollar-pegged. We offer products based on a pay-as-you-go model, which means there are no required monthly payments or plans and you pay only for the services you used.
Overall, the price of reviews in DataForSEO API is around 70% lower than the average market price.
We charge $0.00075 or $0.0015 for a number of reviews specific to the selected platform as shown below. The price also depends on the selected priority of task processing. High-priority tasks return data within 1 minute, while standard-priority tasks take up to 45 minutes to populate the requested info.
See our pricing page for more information.
Importantly, the maximum number of reviews you can pull with one API request is 4490.
Note that using either of the priorities, you can send up to 2000 API calls per minute, with each POST call containing no more than 100 tasks. Contact us if you require custom rate limits or if you’d like to discuss your business needs.
To learn more about the use cases for reviews data, keep on reading.
Why do you need reviews and ratings data?
Customer reviews are a crucial source of insights into the user experience with a company and its products or services. Knowing this, companies are employing online reviews data to inform a variety of business decisions.
In particular, the use case areas for online reviews data include but are not limited to:
- Finding new directions for business growth
- Evaluating consumer needs and pain points
- Strengthening product design and customer service
- Monitoring brand reputation and tracking customer sentiment
- Improving communication with customers
- Analyzing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
- Refining local SEO strategies
In order to cope with these tasks in a more streamlined manner, companies utilize multiple software solutions, such as brand reputation monitoring and review management tools, sentiment analysis software, market research tools, customer intelligence, and competitor intelligence platforms.
As you understand, customer feedback data is the lifeblood of these tools. In the following parts, we will tell what software features are built upon online reviews data and how DataForSEO APIs can help to:
- Enrich a social listening tool with customer feedback
- Launch a website review widget builder
1. Enrich a social listening tool with customer feedback
In order to keep up with the online conversations around a brand on multiple channels, companies turn to social listening platforms. These tools help to identify the prevailing sentiment in brand or product mentions and assess its popularity across the web.
To present users with insights, social listening tools gather data from a variety of social media and online review platforms and process it using text analysis technologies.
As an example of a social listening tool, let’s take a look at BrandMentions. Its simple interface allows users to enter necessary keywords (e.g., product name, brand name, topic), locations, and languages to monitor. The main dashboard view provides a distribution of daily mentions quantity, sentiment, performance score (based on domain rank and social engagement), and more.
BrandMentions monitors social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora, and collects data from reviews published on Google My Business (now Google Business Profile), App Store, and Play Store.
Unlike many other social listening apps, BrandMentions also tracks a website’s backlinks and shows a Domain Influence score (domain rank) of referring resources. This really handy feature helps users to grasp their brand’s online image and popularity on a wider scale. It also allows them to evaluate the potential of increasing rankings in search thanks to the efforts they’ve invested in outreach and publicity.
The cost for the BrandMentions platform goes from $99/mo to $499/mo, which is a fair amount, considering the offered data sources, customization features and filters, and the opportunity to analyze backlinks. However, the platform could further increase the payment threshold by providing more data sources.
With Business Data API and Merchant API, you can develop an enhanced social listening tool by obtaining structured feedback info from the most popular review platforms – Google, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, and Amazon.
Besides that, Business Data API has several social media endpoints which can empower your tool with social interactions a specified page received through Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit. To be more specific, you can get the number of pages’ likes from Facebook, the number of page’s pins on Pinterest, as well as subreddit details from each share of the page on Reddit.
Using data from our Backlinks API, you can also complete your feature offering with backlink tracking and analysis for any website or page.
Overall, APIs can help you significantly decrease the time-to-market of your software. Sure enough, sentiment analysis will remain the most complex part when creating a social listening platform. However, DataForSEO is currently working on such technology, so stay tuned.
Contact us if you would like to discuss your business needs or need more data sources.
2. Launch a website review widget
Reviews added to a website help brands achieve multiple marketing goals – from building trust and credibility to improving engagement and boosting conversions.
While there is an option of adding individual reviews to a website manually, it’s not practical for large businesses that regularly receive lots of reviews and would like to embed them as an interactive feed.
The easiest way to create such a stream of unique and fresh reviews on a website is by using a review widget. Basically, a review widget is a web application that automatically collects reviews and helps website owners to embed a feed without any coding knowledge.
As a rule, widgets come in a free and paid version depending on the number of monthly widget loads (page views), feed updates, accessible review sources, customization features, and so on.
Here’s an example of a review widget for a Wix website. Fera Reviews offers access to Google and Facebook reviews, extensive review grouping by product, and automatic review requests upon completed purchases. The app can also be installed on Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, and custom e-commerce platforms. The cost of the widget’s paid version ranges from $9/mo (3 active widgets, 100 review requests) to $99/mo (5 active widgets, 10,000 review requests).
While some widgets are available as standalone solutions, others function as lead magnets for review management tools or other similar platforms.
For example, Reviewshake offers free reviews widgets for WordPress supporting over 80 sources including Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Google. However, the free plan allows adding up to 2 review sources only. In order to add more, users need to get a paid plan for the Reviewshake platform.
With the Reviews endpoints in DataForSEO Business Data API and Amazon Reviews in Merchant API, you can develop a reviews widget hassle-free. Simply integrate the necessary endpoints, and your data supply will be ready to go, leaving you only to do some work on the app’s interface.
If you’d like to learn more about developing a full-scale reputation management tool with DataForSEO API, check out this article.
How to integrate reviews data API into your platform?
To integrate reviews endpoints from the DataForSEO Business Data API and Merchant API, you will need some developer assistance. The DataForSEO team can provide you with comprehensive guidance on integration free of charge. Feel free to contact us and discuss your needs.
Below, we will provide you with the main integration instructions.
Authentication
The first step in the integration process is configuring your API authentication. You can learn more about this process from our documentation.
DataForSEO is using the Basic Authentication with username and password. Upon registration, you can find this information in the DataForSEO Dashboard. See our help center for instructions..
To download our pre-configured Postman collection or PHP client, please visit our documentation.
Request Reviews
Before you can collect data on reviews from a specific platform, you need to request it using a POST method:
https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/business_data/$review_platform/reviews/task_post
POST parameters are specific to the selected review platform. You can find complete lists by the links below:
- Yelp
- Tripadvisor
- Trustpilot
Here’s a cURL example for requesting Google reviews:
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{ "id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",This command will return the following response:
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
Note that you will need to copy the IDs of the posted tasks from the “id” fields to retrieve their results. Example ID: 04011309-0696-0199-0000-dc2348782221
Retrieving reviews
In order to collect the results of the posted tasks with data on reviews, use a GET request at: https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/business_data/$review_platform/reviews/task_get/$id
Instead of $id, use the ID of the task you posted in the previous step.
Here’s a cURL example for retrieving Google reviews:
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
The API response will contain data in JSON structured as follows:
{
"version": "0.1.20200325",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.1922 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "03271847-1535-0199-0000-a0625a4a5121",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0218 sec.",
Following these simple steps, you can successfully connect your platform to our APIs. Check our documentation to download a read-made PHP Client and review code examples in PHP, NodeJS, Python, and cSharp.
Conclusion
Customer feedback offers ample opportunities for all kinds of businesses. Accessing data from online review platforms, however, can be challenging without proper technologies.
While developing review scrapers is quite cost- and labor-intensive, most businesses opt for ready-made review APIs that require no maintenance and are easy to integrate.
DataForSEO offers reviews data APIs at a price that’s 70% lower than the market average. Our Business Data Reviews API supplies reviews and ratings from the following sources:
- Yelp
- Tripadvisor
- Trustpilot
Besides that, DataForSEO Merchant API provides buyers’ feedback from the Amazon marketplace.
Using online reviews data from these platforms, you can:
- Enrich a social listening tool with customer feedback
- Launch a website review widget builder
Besides these use cases, you can also build a sentiment analysis tool, a reputation management software, or train your own NLP model using DataForSEO Reviews endpoints. Learn more in our earlier blog post.
To register for a free trial of our APIs and start integrating reviews data, tap the button below.
