How to connect Fomo with Google Reviews
Google Reviews is an excellent resource for local businesses.
If you have product or service reviews that you're proud of, hosted on your Google Places listing, you can stream this on your website with Fomo.
Setting up this connection takes just a couple minutes, and requires no coding experience.
Step 1 - Find your Google Places ID
Visit this free resource from Google and input your place of business.
After selecting your result, you should see text "Place ID ..." in the listing bubble. Copy this to your clipboard.
Step 2 - Connect to Fomo
While logged in to Fomo, visit the Integrations tab > click Google Reviews. Click 'connect with Google Reviews'.
Inside the "Google Places ID" text box, provide the data we found above. Note: do not include "Place ID," just the random string of characters after it. In the example above, the Place ID is "ChIJ96LAxMpKW4YRBgs2Zstiag0."
Inside the "Minimum Rating" text box, provide a threshold for the ratings you want to allow. If you input '3', for example, only reviews with at least a 3 or higher rating will be included in your Fomo notifications.
Advanced troubleshooting
If you see an error when you try to connect on this screen, you might have an invalid Google Places ID. We use Google Places's public API for this integration. Go here, enter your ID, note the error code, and look up what the error code means here.
In the past, users have reported that updating the information on their Google My Business (particularly the physical address to a street location vs a region) bypassed the error.
Step 3 - You're Done!
The Google Reviews API only allows imports of up to 5 reviews. Despite many requests for more than 5 reviews on Google's forums, there is still no way around this limit. This means that the first time you connect your Google Reviews integration, Fomo immediately imports 5 reviews.
Google uses it's own algorithm to display what Google has determined to be the most relevant reviews. Click that link to see in detail how Google determines relevancy, but in general it is reviews that a) Have 5 stars b) Are the longest.
This may mean that Google reviews from several months ago are imported. We recommend you check the dates and adjust your Time Ago settings to 365 days + in order to ensure reviews are displayed.
You can also use Flows to ensure reviews are displayed more often to your visitors.
To edit the message structure of your Fomo notifications, simply visit the Templates tab while logged into Fomo, and edit the 'Google Places Review' template.