You may notice that the "Posted" date and "Review" dates differ on some (but not all) reviews. Here's an explanation of why that can happen, and what it means for your review reports.
Date Definitions
The "Posted" date of a review is the date that it is published by the review site and picked up by Revinate. It is a date set by our system when we collect the review, and it's typically the day in which the review was initially published by the review site.
The "Review" date is the date listed on the review site as the date the review was written. (Note that not all review sites display a review date.)
Why The Dates Can be Different
First of all, the date that is showing up on the review site next to a review is not necessarily the date that the review was published live by the site. It's actually the date that the author of the review submitted the review. Sometimes there can be a lag between the day a review is written and the day it is published to a review site. The same protocol applies to your management responses as well. Review sites may not actually publish your management response the day you send it. It may take them a day or more to post that. Revinate has no control over this lag - it is up to the review sites. Some sites post reviews immediately, while other sites publish less frequently.
Once a review (or management response) has been published by the review site, our system then needs to pick up on the new content. After we pick up on the new content, we need to process it on our end. This involves analyzing the content for sentiment analysis, making sure there’s no duplications, etc. before we can even publish the review into your Revinate account. Due to the extensive data collection process, you may see a review picked up and posted in Revinate anywhere from a few hours after it's posted on the review site, to potentially 24-48 hours. When Revinate discovers that a new review is published, our system sets the "Posted" date as the date that the review is published by the review site and picked up by Revinate. Again, if the review site includes a "Review" date, we collect that date as well so that we can display it for you as the date that the review was written.
In rare cases where Revinate misses new data on review sites (reviews or rankings), or when review sites are slow to publish data, it should be captured by our system in the following day's cycle, and reported in the that day's email alerts. If you experience a discrepancy of more than 24 hours, please don't hesitate to email support@revinate.com and we will look into it asap. We know you rely on Revinate data and we are constantly working to improve how quickly we update our data.
What This Means for Your Reports
As soon as we detect a previously unpublished review, we want to make sure it is brought to your attention. So we'll mark the review with the appropriate "Posted" date (the date the review was published by the review site). The Revinate posted date is the best way for us to standardize a date for each review, since the “Posted” date across the various reviews is often different (some show the date the review was submitted to the site by the author, whereas some show the date the review was published live on the site, etc.). All of the property-level data and corporate data works off the same process.
Furthermore, we sort all review lists by "Posted" date, so that you can see all the newly posted reviews first. For example, if Expedia publishes a review today, even if it was written last week it will be listed as more recent than TripAdvisor reviews written and published a day or two ago. We feel it's important to handle dates in this manner so that newly published reviews will always be brought to your attention. In addition to listing reviews based on "Posted" date, we also use "Posted" dates for all of our analytics, including charts and email alerts. Again, it's important that all new reviews are brought to your attention via alerts, and the only way to make sure of this is to use "Posted" dates to identify reviews for your alert notifications.
Finally, from a reporting standpoint, the reports in Revinate are all based of the posted date in Revinate as well. Your corporate reports are pulling the exact same data and dates as the property-level. As long as the user is working off the data as it displays in Revinate, they should obtain clear and concise reports.
Bottom Line
In most cases, the lag between Review and Posted dates is very small - and in many cases reviews are posted the same day as they are written. Please let us know if you have any feedback or additional questions.