Google reviews to Looker Studio
Reviewflowz keeps a Google Sheet of your reviews current in your own Drive, and Looker Studio reads a Google Sheet natively. Rating by location sits beside the local traffic it came from, on a page you hand out as a link.
Set up in under five minutes • No demo required
Reviews and Google traffic, finally on the same row
Both halves already live in the same account. A Google review arrives tied to a Business Profile listing, and the sessions on that listing's local page are already in your analytics property. Putting them on one row is a blend inside Looker Studio, joined on the location name.
That row turns a star average from a score into a question. Take an eleven site garden centre group. Chorley pulls more Google traffic than anywhere else in the estate, 3,180 sessions in ninety days, and turns 3.0 percent of it into a tap for directions: the busiest local page they have, behind the worst rated shop.
The rating does not explain the rest, which is the useful half. Tarporley rates 4.7 and converts at 3.7 percent. Knutsford is the quietest site by traffic and the hardest converting, at 7.6 percent. Read either column alone and you back the wrong site.
The line at the foot of that table reads 4.5 stars and 4.6 percent, and it is the line that gets reported. Above it the ratings run 4.1 to 4.8 and the rate runs 3.0 to 7.6. An estate average is an average of eleven arguments.
Redwing GA4
| Profile Name | Rating | Sessions | Directions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redwing Chorley | 4.1 | 3,180 | 3.0% |
| Redwing Cheadle | 4.6 | 3,020 | 4.9% |
| Redwing Tarporley | 4.7 | 2,410 | 3.7% |
| Redwing Wilmslow | 4.7 | 2,240 | 5.4% |
| Redwing Knutsford | 4.8 | 940 | 7.6% |
| All 11 sites | 4.5 | 20,740 | 4.6% |
Reviewflowz supplies one side of this table. The sessions come from your own analytics property, and the two only meet inside your report.
The path is a Google Sheet, and both ends are Google
Looker Studio has no OData connector. Reviewflowz does ship an OData feed on Premium, and it is the road into Power BI and Tableau, but you cannot point Looker Studio at it. Worth knowing before you spend an afternoon trying.
What Looker Studio does read, natively, is a Google Sheet. So that is the path. Reviewflowz creates one spreadsheet in your own Google Drive, writes your Google reviews into it, and keeps it current. In Looker Studio you pick Add data, then Google Sheets, then that file. Nothing to install, nothing to host.
It is a sync rather than an export. Every thirty minutes, at two past and thirty two past, new reviews insert at the top, an edited review updates its own row, and a review that came down loses its row. Nobody re-runs anything.
Reviewflowz asks Google for access to the one file it created and nothing else in your Drive. The reviews tab is protected with a warning, so anyone typing over it is told the sync will overwrite them. Seeding it with your past Google reviews is a paid step you take once, and the trend line starts full.
There is no OData connector in Looker Studio, so the Reviewflowz OData feed is the road into Power BI and Tableau rather than this one. Looker takes the sheet.
Column B is your location dimension
There is no location column in the sheet, and there does not need to be. Each Google Business Profile listing is its own review profile in Reviewflowz, so connecting one Google account brings in every open listing at once, and every review lands with its listing beside it in column B, Profile Name.
Looker Studio picks that up as a dimension with no work. Break any chart down by Profile Name and you have per site. Score comes in as a metric you set to AVG, and Review Date as a date, so the built in date range control drives the whole page from the first minute.
Column B holds the listing title, not an address, so chain listings named the same thing are genuinely ambiguous. The fix is cheap and you do it once: rename each profile in Reviewflowz before you seed the history. The nightly refresh from Google does not overwrite what you typed.
The header is fixed at twenty eight columns and never changes shape, so a chart bound to a field keeps working the day you open a twelfth site. Nothing gets renamed under you and nothing shifts a column to the right, so a report built in June still runs in December.
The same header carries the columns other platforms fill, Pros, Cons and Reviewer Job Title among them. They are empty on a Google row, so hide them here in the data source rather than in the sheet.
Profile Name is the listing title Google shows, not an address. Rename a profile in Reviewflowz and the nightly refresh from Google leaves your name alone.
One page for the board. One for each site manager.
This is the actual reason to pick Looker Studio over the BI tool finance already pays for. Sharing costs nothing and needs nobody. A report goes out as a link, and the person who opens it needs no licence, no seat, and no login to Reviewflowz.
One report, a page per audience. A group page carrying the number the Monday meeting asks for. A site page pinned to one Profile Name, so a manager sees their own reviews and not the eleven site league table. A reviews page holding the words, filtered to reviews that actually have text.
A viewer cannot clear a filter you pinned to a page, and cannot reach the sheet behind it unless you shared that too. The link is the whole grant, and you take it back in the same panel you gave it in.
The report reads the sheet rather than a copy of it, so nobody is maintaining a monthly version. The one that drifts is always the export somebody made in July and emailed round, and there is no longer a reason for it to exist.
Nobody replies from here. Reviewflowz posts your replies to Google, and there is no reply column in the sheet behind this report, so what a viewer holds is the counting instrument and not the inbox.
Google review volume tracks footfall
Nobody is invited to leave a Google review. There is no request campaign behind the number, so it follows the people who came through the door: it climbs into the weekend, spikes after a campaign or a bank holiday, and drops the week the car park is being resurfaced.
A monthly average is the one figure that cannot show that. Across those eleven sites August ran 346 reviews over thirty one days, eleven a day. Its Saturdays ran twenty to thirty and its Tuesdays five to six. The monthly number reports neither, and it is the number most reputation reports lead with.
Looker Studio draws it off column J, which carries the full timestamp rather than a date. Put one date range control on the page and the same chart answers last week and last quarter, without anyone building a second one.
It also lets you put a date beside something you did. A planting weekend, a new manager, a piece in the local paper: the rows are timestamped to the minute, so the spike either lines up with it or it does not.
Google reviews
Column J holds the minute each Google review landed, and nothing invited a single one of them, so what this line draws is the front door, not a send schedule.
Send the slice each report needs
A report can carry more than one data source, and each one is its own Reviewflowz sync writing its own spreadsheet. So the report you hand a site manager was never filtered down from the group numbers. It was never holding them.
That is not a technicality. A filter inside a report is a control, and a control can be cleared by whoever opens the link. A sync that only ever wrote fifty eight rows cannot be widened by anybody.
A Google sync narrows on three things: which profiles it covers, the score, and whether the review has any text at all. A sheet holding only the two star and below reviews is a setting rather than a formula, and that is the one worth putting on a screen in the back office.
There is no language filter on a Google sync and no keyword filter on any platform. Language and tags arrive as columns instead, K and Z, so you slice on them inside Looker Studio, across the whole history rather than across whatever arrives from now on.
All three sheets carry the same twenty eight column header. Only the rows differ.
So a chart you build against one of them runs against any of the three, and swapping a report's source is a field mapping that already matches.
Each sync is its own file in your Drive with its own link, so the Chorley sheet can be shared without the group sheet travelling with it.
Put rating by location beside the traffic it came from
Set up in under five minutes. No demo required.
Is there a Reviewflowz connector for Looker Studio?
No, and Looker Studio has no OData connector either, so the OData feed Reviewflowz offers on Premium is the road into Power BI and Tableau rather than this one. The path here is a Google Sheet: Reviewflowz creates one in your own Google Drive, syncs your Google reviews into it, and Looker Studio reads a Google Sheet as a first class data source. Both ends are Google, so there is nothing to install and nothing to host.
How does the report know which location a review came from?
Column B, Profile Name, on every row, which arrives in Looker Studio as a dimension you can break any chart down by. Each Google Business Profile listing is its own review profile in Reviewflowz, so connecting one Google account brings in every open listing at once. Column B carries the listing title rather than an address, so if several of your listings read the same, rename each profile in Reviewflowz once, before you seed the history.
How current is the dashboard?
Reviewflowz writes the sheet every thirty minutes, at two past and thirty two past. New reviews insert at the top, a review its author edited updates its own row, and a removed review loses its row. Looker Studio reads that sheet and refreshes on its own; the report also carries a refresh control if you want it now rather than shortly.
Can I share the report outside the company?
Yes, with Looker Studio's own sharing, and that is usually the reason teams pick it. A site manager, a franchisee or a client opens a link. They need no Reviewflowz login, no seat and no licence for anything.
Does the report start with our Google review history?
Yes, once you seed it. Seeding the sheet with your past Google reviews is a step you take once, on a paid plan, and after it the trend line is full from the first morning. On the free trial that step is locked, so a trial sheet fills from new reviews only.
Can I choose which Google reviews go into a report?
Yes, on the way in. Each sync covers the profiles you pick and can be restricted by score or to reviews that have text, and each sync writes its own spreadsheet, so a narrow report is a narrow source rather than a filter somebody can clear. There is no language filter on a Google sync and no keyword filter on any platform; language and tags come in as columns you filter on inside the report instead.
Can Reviewflowz see the rest of my Google Drive?
No. The Drive permission it asks for covers files it created itself, which is the spreadsheet. It cannot list, read or change anything else in your Drive.
Do I need a demo to get started?
No. You connect your Google Business Profile, pick Google Sheets as the destination and connect your Google account yourself, in under five minutes. 14 day free trial, no credit card.