Did you know that when you check your reviews in iTunes that you probably aren’t seeing all of your reviews? That is because iTunes has an individual store for 120 different countries. Your show is listed in every version (as far as I know) and each has the possibility of some additional reviews from foreign listeners! There are services that would love to charge you a lot of cash for every podcast you own every single month… but with a little elbow grease you can check these reviews yourself… or even set up a feed to have new reviews delivered to you automatically. All for free.
I’m going to show you two URL strings. The first will help you quickly see if you have any reviews in a given country. The second will help you set up a series of RSS feeds to pull in new reviews as they come in.
Check for iTunes Reviews in Other Countries
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id210163911
This is a web link to my clean comedy podcast That Story Show. Your show will have it’s own unique ID which you can find by looking up your show in iTunes (look for /id###########). Take that id number and replace mine and boom, you’re ready to start hunting for extra reviews. See the /us/ part? That’s the country code and it’s currently set to the United States. To check your reviews in Canada you’d replace that /us/ with /ca/ and my id with your show’s id (marked red).
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/id210163911
Scroll down and if there are any reviews you’ll see at most three of them under your episode listing.
You can do this 120 times if you’d like… but you’re better off limiting yourself to English speaking countries. If you have any kind of download tracking that tells you where in the world your content is being downloaded… start with those countries. I added a ClustrMap to my site a few weeks ago and just used the top countries listed. My findings were that only English speaking countries had any reviews. So go for the gold if you’d like… but here are the country codes for the one’s I’d suggest:
- United States – us
- Canada – ca
- Australia – au
- Great Britain – gb
- Ireland – ie
- United Arab Emirates – ae
Obviously if you have a foreign language podcast then head over to iTunes “Choose Your Country” page, mouse-over the flag icons and find any other country code you may be interested in.
Setup Automatic Notification of New International iTunes Reviews
NOTE: The information below is out of date. The link structure still works but trying to use Feedly now is a hassle. Use your favorite feed reader for better results.
So now you know how to look for bonus reviews. How about being able to monitor them automatically? Here’s the URL for that:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=210163911/sortBy=mostRecent/xml
This link generates an RSS feed listing every review your show has in that particular country’s store. It’s raw RSS so I use Feedly to parse it out and make it look good.
You can use whatever RSS reader you prefer. Just replace my show’s id with your show’s id then copy-and-paste that URL into your reader. Label it “Reviews from US” or whatever you’d like. THEN replace /us/ with the next country and repeat the process until you have every feed added to your RSS reader. It’s a bit of work… but after you’re done any new reviews will show up automatically.
What Now?
I plan to start thanking folks who leave new reviews and brag on the country of origin. Heck, maybe I can get a friendly multi-national rivalry going! Also, in any English-speaking countries where I don’t have reviews… well now I know who to pick on! 🙂
So pay for the services out there if you’d like. I’m sure they’re fantastic… but I like free better. If all of the above seems like too much work then I’d suggest ReviewCast.io. Submit some info on your Podcast and they’ll send you the latest 25 reviews, from all countries, to your email inbox. This is not automatic however so to get updated results you’ll have to visit the site and resubmit the form.
Do you have your own way of tracking this kind of info? Either way I hope this helped! If you end up finding a goldmine of extra reviews I’d love to hear about it in the comments!