Competitive Reviews

About Competitive Reviews

Analyzing your competitors’ reviews can help you understand your business’s brand perception in comparison to competitors, giving you specific areas where your online reputation already excels and where it can improve. It’s especially important comparing to competitors on a local level, where the specific competitors for each of your stores may change.

To set up competitive reviews in Qualtrics, you’ll first upload a directory of your competitors’ business profiles, location-by-location. From there, you’ll link each of your locations to their competitors, then set up a Reputation Management project. Once that’s finished, you can build dashboards your location managers can use to get insights on local competitors.

Step 1: Preparing Your Own Location Data

Before you start pulling competitor reviews into Qualtrics, it’s important to make sure you’ve already got location data started for your own brand. If you’ve already set up a Reputation Management project for your own brand, or you have a directory of your locations already uploaded, you can skip this section.

Otherwise, it’s important to start with your own location data, because competitor stores can be linked to yours. Follow the steps on this page to upload your own locations.

We also recommend that you already have your company’s location data added to a reputation management project.

Step 2: Creating a Competitor Location Directory

1. Go to Directories.
   
2. Select CX Location Directory.
   
3. Click Add location directory.
   
4. Name your directory.
5. Select This directory will contain competitor data.
6. Select your location directory that you’d like to link to this one.
   Attention: This step is optional, but very important. It determines whether you will be able to link your own location data to compare against local competitors. We’ll cover how this linking works in more detail below.
7. Click Save your location directory.
8. Decide how to upload locations to your directory. This is the same way you’d add information to any other location directory. See the linked pages for:
   • Uploading Location Data from a CSV File
   • Uploading Location Data with an Automated Workflow

Step 3: Linking Competitors to Your Locations

You have 2 ways you can link a location to its competitors: manually or with a file upload.

Manually linking locations

1. Open your brand’s location directory.
   
2. Next to a location, click the 3 dots.
3. Click Edit.
4. Open Competitor Locations.
   
5. You can search by any information linked to the competitor, such as city or location name. Click Enter to perform a search.
6. Select each of the competitors. You’ll see the location ID and location name for each.
7. Click Save.
8. Repeat this process until each location has all of its competitors matched to it.

Linking locations via CSV Upload

1. Go to your competitor location directory.
   
2. Download the file or keep this tab open. You want to reference Location IDs.
3. Go to your brand’s location directory.
   
4. Download the file.
5. Add a new column named CompetitorLocationIds.
6. For each location, add the competitors in the following format:
   
   • [LOC_Competitor1,LOC_Competitor2,LOC_Competitor3]
   • Square brackets on either side of the list.
   • Comma separated, no spaces.
   • Use location IDs of the competitors, no other identifiers.
7. Reupload the file to your brand’s location directory.

Step 4: Aggregating Competitor Data

1. Go to your competitor location directory.
   
2. Select Settings.
3. Go to Reporting.
4. You’ll start with one field already set up: location IDs.
5. Click Add new aggregation field.
6. Add the fields from your location directory you want to be able to use to filter data in dashboard reporting.
   
   Example: In this screenshot, we chose to map location name and city, because those fields will be easier for dashboard users to identify than a location ID. Other common choices include store code.
   Qtip: You can only add up to 5 aggregated fields total.
7. When you’re finished, click Save.
8. Read the warning.
   
9. Click Save again.

Step 5: Creating the Project

1. Go to the catalog and create a Reputation Management project.
   
2. Select Competitor reviews.
   
3. Click Next.
4. Select the competitor directory you created in the previous steps.
   
5. Double-check to make sure the location data that appears to the right looks correct.
6. Click Next.
7. Select the websites you’d like to pull reviews from for each of your locations.
   
8. Click Done to proceed.
9. Your reputation management project will be created!

Step 6: Preparing a Dashboard Dataset

Once competitive review data has started to pull into your Reputation Management project, you can put together a dashboard dataset.

1. Create a data model dataset.
   
2. Click Add Source.
   
3. Add the following sources:
   • Your company location directory
   • Your competitor location directory
     Qtip: Filter for location directories under All source types by selecting Locations.
4. Create a union with these two directories.
   
5. Go to Field editor.
6. Look for the aggregated columns from your competitor directory and match them to the corresponding fields in your company directory. For example:
   
   • AggregatedCity – City
   • AggregatedLocationName – Location Name
   • AggregatedStateProvince – StateProvince
7. Set the field type for competitorLocations to id.
   
   Qtip: Before you go on to the next step, we recommend making sure your fields have presentable names for your dashboard. For example, “aggregatedCity” could become “City,” “LocationExternalReference” could be “Store Code,” and so on.
8. Add the following sources:
   
   • Your competitor reputation management project
   • Your company reputation management project
     Qtip: Reputation management projects are under External Datasources.
9. Follow these steps (in this same data model dataset) to create a union of your reputation management projects, then join them with your location union.
   
   Qtip: Your join key is _recordId in the location directories, matched to the subjectReferenceId in your reputation management projects.
10. Add your output dataset.
    
11. Publish your changes.
12. Create a new dashboard.
13. Add your dataset to it.

Step 7: Customizing Dashboards

Filtering Company and Competitive Reviews At the Same Time

One of the most valuable insights you can add to your competitive reviews dashboard is a filter that uses an aggregated field. This is the main way locations managers can narrow down results to the local competitors relevant to them, plus the performance of their own stores.

1. Add widgets to your dashboard. For example, a response ticker that pulls in all review data.
   Qtip: Make sure the location name or store code is set to the title or subtitle, so you can identify which reviews are which.
2. Create a dashboard page filter.
3. Filter by an aggregated field like Store Code.
   Example: Location managers can filter by store code to see competitors as well as their own reviews for their specific location.
4. As the filter is adjusted by dashboard visitors, the widget will accordingly change the data it displays, showing both competitors’ and your own brand’s reviews.

These widgets will still be affected by the filters we covered in the previous section, so these can be a great starting point for location managers to see their scores vs. their local competitors. See more on filter interactions.

1. Add a pair of widgets to your dashboard, such as star rating widgets.
2. On each widget, add a filter.
3. Filter by Dataset source.
   
4. For one widget, set this source to your brand’s Reputation Management data.
5. For the other widget, repeat these steps, but set the source filter to your Competitive Reviews project instead.

Other Dashboard Design Guides

You can build your competitive reviews dashboard however you want. Here are some guides that might be useful:

• Planning Your Dashboard Design: How to design a dashboard for your stakeholders.
• Building Your Dashboard: Common widgets and their setups.
• Field Types: Field types affect the widgets you can use with those fields. Includes tables showing what types can be used with which widgets.
• Reputation Management Fields: Common fields included with your Reputation Management data.
• Location Fields: Common fields included with your location directories.

Managing Competitor Profiles

Once your reputation management project is created, you can edit the profiles, export the locations, and more. The following links go to the “Searching the Web for Reviews” support page, but the functionality is the same for competitor profiles.

• Exporting Locations
• Manage Profiles

Linking Location Directories

If you didn’t link your company and competitor directories together when you first created them, that’s okay. You can follow the steps below.

1. Open your competitor directory.
   
2. Go to Settings.
3. Go to Manage directory.
4. Under Connected Directories, select your company directory.
   Qtip: If you have already linked individual locations by competitor, you can’t edit the connected directory. You’ll have to remove those individual location links before you can change the linked directory here.
5. Click Save.

Use Your Business Profiles

When setting up your competitor profiles, you may see an option called Use your business profiles. This option is in preview and is not available to all users. If you have questions about this feature, please reach out to your Preview program representative.

FAQs