Using Trackur to Monitor Local Reviews

When Trackur users started asking for plans that monitored their specific niche, we looked at how we could offer plans that were “one-size-fits-all.” After all, the variations are virtually limitless–restaurants, hotels, local businesses, doctors, etc.

We found the perfect solution by tackling this from a different perspective. We allowed our Premium and Ultimate users to customize Trackur for their own niche. In this walk-through, I’m going to show you how easily you can set-up Trackur to monitor reviews of your restaurant–in this case, the fantastic Winston’s Grille in Raleigh, NC.

So, we already know that Trackur will monitor mainstream media (newspapers etc), social media (blogs), Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and much more, out of the box. But, let’s really put Trackur to work by customizing it to include popular restaurant review web sites.

First, let’s add reviews from  UrbanSpoon. While they don’t offer an RSS feed specifically for Winston’s Grille, that’s OK, because they offer RSS feeds for all reviews in Raleigh. We’ll add these feeds, and later use Trackur to narrow-down to show only reviews for Winston’s Grille.

We’ll grab the RSS feed:

http://www.urbanspoon.com/w/feed/comments/25/Research-Triangle/rss.xml

We’re going to add these RSS feeds to Trackur so that it acts just like any RSS reader you may currently use–only with more features!  Under “Settings” you’ll see the option for “Feeds.”  Click that, and you’ll end up here:

Paste the first RSS feed URL into the empty box.  Once Trackur confirms the feed is valid, you can then click “Add Feed.”  Trackur will now start adding any new items to your personal database of results.

Next, we’ll do the same with TripAdvisor,  and Insider Pages.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Feeds-d446317-treviews.xml

http://www.insiderpages.com/b/3717497157/index.xml

As you’ll see, all three of these services offer an RSS feed that is specific to Winston’s Grille reviews.

We add those feeds the same way we did before, and we end up with our final list:

OK, now let’s head back to the Trackur dashboard and set up our search. For the main keyword, we’ll enter “Winston”s Grille” – you do not need to add quotes, as Trackur will treat it as an exact match.

By default, Trackur will now include its normal results, plus your added RSS feeds. If you wish to only view your custom feeds, you can simply change the “Advanced Search” option as follows:

Let’s say we want to see only new reviews that mention something negative about the restaurant. We can add words that would trigger our concerns, such as:

Now, Trackur will only show results that mention Winston’s Grille, and one of the words we added as a filter. This can be useful if you get a lot of customer reviews, but only want to be alerted to those that are negative. Our advice is to leave the filters blank so you can see both the positive and negative reviews.

And, it’s as easy as that!

It’ll take Trackur about 45-60 minutes to start indexing your custom RSS feeds–and keep in mind that it will only update as it finds new reviews that match your keywords.

I hope this brief tutorial is useful. As you can see our custom feeds option lets you fine tune Trackur to target any niche that is relevant to you.

If you’d like a free demo of our Trackur Ultimate Plan, please fill out this form.

Thanks for using Trackur!