Online Reviews: Statistics That Will Blow Your Mind [2024]

All You Need to Know About Online Reviews

81% of consumers say they need to trust a brand before making a purchase decision. Reviews are a great way to build more trust for your brand.

I’m sure you already know what reviews are, and you probably have written some yourself.

I won’t waste your time by rambling about the definition, but if you want to refresh your memory, take a look at some customer review examples.

Now, let’s dive into the wonderful world of online reviews statistics.

Do people really read reviews?

First of all, do people really read and care about reviews?

Oh boy, do they! 

As the statistics below show, online reviews are extremely effective and important for your business.

• 93% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase.
• 58% of consumers would be ready to pay more or travel further to visit companies with good reviews.

It’s not just written reviews that affect us. In fact, images and videos have an even greater impact on shoppers.

• 62% of consumers are more likely to purchase if they see photos and videos of other customers.
• 2 out of 3 consumers say they’re more likely to make a purchase after watching a testimonial video.
• When you replace your landing page reviews with video testimonials, your conversion rate can increase by 80%.

Read more video testimonial statistics in a dedicated article.

What about negative reviews?

Unfortunately, every business will most likely get negative reviews at some point. 

It does have an effect on your sales:

• Only 9% of customers would be willing to engage with a business that has an average star rating of 1 or 2 stars.
• 94% of consumers have avoided a company because of its negative reviews.

If you do get negative reviews, do not fall into desperation. You can still fix the situation by answering to the negative reviews. Here’s some tips on how to do that.

Is it that bad, though?

On the other hand, it seems that a mixture of negative and positive reviews is what appears most trustworthy to the customers.

That is understandable, as exclusively positive reviews can come across as fake, which would be totally suspicious and not at all trustworthy. 👀

In fact, we have already known for years that an average rating between 4.2 and 4.5 is the best range to be in!

In what channels do people read online reviews?

Here’s some facts on where people read online reviews:

• 80% of customers read online reviews on mobile phones.
• According to Reviewtrackers, 63% read reviews on Google, 45% on Yelp, and around one fourth of consumers refer to Tripadvisor or Facebook reviews.
• Additionally, 88% of all reviews come from those four online review sites.

Why do people leave reviews?

Most common reasons for leaving reviews are

• The product was excellent (56%)
• The product did not fulfill expectations (41%)
• Reviewer wants to help other understand the product (38%)
• The product arrived broken (29%)
• The reviewer was offered an incentive (29%)
• The product was too expensive compared to the quality (22%)
• The reviewer has ideas for improving the product (20%)

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons for people to leave reviews, some of them positive and some negative. 

In fact, most people are willing to leave reviews. 71% will submit a review after being satisfied and if the company makes it easy for them to do so.

How many reviews should a business have?

Even just one review is great, but the more the merrier.

• Businesses who have 200 or more reviews have twice as much revenue compared to others.
• Average local business has 39 Google reviews.
• Hotels have an average of 309 reviews.
• Additionally, the reviews must be recent to be trustworthy, say 83% of customers. 
• 73% of consumers don’t even consider reviews if they were not written during the past month.

It’s important to answer to customer feedback

Like stated before, negative reviews are not the end of the world if you respond to them.

But negative reviews are not the only reviews you should respond to, and sometimes your responses can affect the customer’s opinion about you.

• Customer churn can increase by 15% if you do not respond to feedback.
• 56% have changed their opinion about a business because of a response that the business gave for a review.
• 54% of local businesses respond to all or at least most reviews, even though it seems that companies will rather respond to positive reviews than negative ones (Findstack). 
• Over half of customers (53%) expect brands to respond to negative reviews within 7 days, while one third expects a response in 3 days.
• Industry leaders (the top 10% of brands) answer significantly faster than businesses on average (Review Trackers).

How have reviews changed lately?

Reviewtrackers’ 2022 report shows a few changes in reviews compared to the pre-pandemic times.

• Review interaction has increased by 50%! That tells a lot about consumers’ attitudes towards businesses and products. We want to know the true colors of the businesses that we engage with.
• Online reviews are much shorter. It’s not surprising, since we all know how short our attention spans are getting.

Something surprising?

You might not know this, but reviews also improve your SEO efforts and increase your conversions!

• Reviews affect your SEO rankings by over 15%. The flipside is that negative sentiment can harm the SEO rankings.
• Even a 0.1% increase in your business’ star rating accounts for a 25% increase in conversions.

Google’s Take on Reviews

In November 2023, Google released yet another reviews update to their search algorithm.

This is the third reviews update this year and Google has said that they will continue to update their review system with regular intervals. The review system aims to emphasize real reviews from real users of products or services and weed out all AI writer generated summaries.

Or other reviews that don’t indicate that the reviewer is an actual expert in what they’re reviewing.

TLDR; If your site doesn’t have high-quality reviews from real customers already, you can expect your search engine rankings to take a dive.

Have you already added review schema to your website?

Our Research on Reviews

I get it, not all companies have thousands of customers. One of the most common pain points about reviews is not having enough of them.

Some companies have a handful of customers per year, and that’s fine as well.

To offer some benchmarks, I accessed our database and dug for some real insights.

Data Used

The data consists of over 12,000 companies that imported reviews from a third-party solution (Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor, etc.) to Trustmary. These imported reviews can then be showcased easily on one’s website with review widgets.

The data used in this analysis was 100% anonymous, as the answers were pulled from our data storage by using SQL queries. (Okay, I didn’t pull them, but one of our devs did.)

Our data currently consists of over 5 million imported reviews (5 149 173 to be exact) and over 100,000 Trustmary reviews.

Average Number of Reviews

According to our research:

• Median number of reviews per company was 28
• The maximum number of reviews one company has is a whopping 387,172 reviews
• Average number of reviews per company was 164,7 reviews.

Relationship between Feedback and Reviews

In addition to importing reviews, companies can measure customer satisfaction with NPS, star review form, or CSAT and collect Trustmary reviews with the same survey.

Shockingly, the average NPS for Trustmary users is 54,97 👀

If you didn’t know, the range for NPS is from -100 to 100. Generally speaking, getting to the plus side means you’re on the right track.

If you’re wondering why NPS is in a review statistics article, here’s why:

People who answer to your NPS survey are likely the people who’ll review you.

Trustmary Method enables you to do the following with one survey

• Measure NPS / star rating / CSAT
• Collect open feedback
• Turn that feedback into reviews

We’ve streamlined the process because 40% of people you send a survey open the email. 65% of them leave feedback – and 20-30% of the feedback immediately turns into reviews and testimonials.

In other words: If you send a survey with Trustmary to 100 customers 26 will provide feedback and 8 will leave a review.

Average Review Length Measured in Characters

• Trustedshops: 32,3
• Google Play: 56,2
• Trustmary: 99,3
• Google: 104,8
• Booking.com: 113,7
• Facebook: 202,5
• Airbnb: 299,9
• Capterra: 440,2
• Yelp: 449,3
• Tripadvisor: 578,2
• G2: 734

This data included over 5 million imported reviews.

Any surprises? I was initially surprised by the fact that Facebook reviews are twice as long as Google reviews, but it might have to do with two things:

• Google reviews are usually written on a mobile device, while Facebook users might opt for desktop
• Facebook reviews are left for local businesses that you deeply care about, while Google reviews might be prompted by Google after you navigated to the place using Google Maps.

Here’s what we have learned

That’s a lot to take in already, but let us add our personal viewpoint to the matter.

Trustmary has helped hundreds of companies to increase their conversions by showcasing customer reviews and testimonials on their website.

Benefits from Having Customer Reviews

• Improve customer experience based on reviews
• Improving your whole business
• Focus on customer service
• Build trust in potential customers
• Learn about quality of products and services
• Reward staff based on results

Are you looking to get more reviews? Here’s a quick and easy way to get more Google reviews with a FREE review campaign.

Start by typing your Google My Business location below ⬇️

Key Findings from Our Tests on Customer Reviews:

• When website visitors were shown customer reviews on the website, eCommerce conversion rate increased by 67% compared to customers who did not see reviews.
• Similarly, the service booking conversion rate increased by 29%, and
• Contact requests increased by 22%.

Additionally, real clients of ours have reached amazing benefits when using our review software.

Our client Pesurivuokraus.fi was able to collect 308 reviews in 5 months by implementing our review software. That’s a huge number compared to the cleaning industry average of 13 Google reviews!

Satokausikalenteri learned that people who see customer video testimonials in the online store are more likely to purchase than those who did not see a video.

When implementing customer reviews in Facebook and Instagram marketing, our client Mutjutin was able to reduce the marketing budget by almost 22% and increase sales by 140%!

They also found that showcasing review notifications on their product page increased the conversion rate by over 22%.

Everyone Needs Reviews

Online shoppers want to see online reviews before hitting that buy button, but so do people in the consideration phase as well.

And across all industries both in B2B and B2C. If you thought B2B online reviews weren’t a thing, you’re wrong.

As you can surely see, online reviews affect many areas of your business.

1. They create trust for your brand and products
2. They help in search engine optimization
3. They build your online reputation and online visibility
4. They increase conversions on your website

But what is the easiest way to leverage online reviews?

When you implement Trustmary review software, you can quickly and easily import all your existing online reviews from the most popular review sites to your own website.

Additionally, you can display them with stylish widgets that certainly catch the attention of your website visitors. Try e.g. our free Google review widget or Facebook review widget.

And that’s not all: with an advanced subscription, you can collect reviews, testimonials and video testimonials from your customers with surveys that you can formulate in our easy-to-use survey tool.

Sign up and see how easy it is!

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