📌 Overview
Two questions come up often from customers who manage Google Business Profile (GBP) locations: how much it costs to auto-reply to a Google review, and whether several GBP projects can be combined into one report. This article explains how to find your cost per reply in credits and dollars, and how to compare results across projects.
💳 How Credits Apply to Review Auto-Replies
When auto-reply is turned on for a GBP project, each review the platform responds to can use credits from your account balance. The exact number of credits per reply depends on your plan and on how the feature is configured, so it is best to confirm it for your own account rather than rely on a general figure.
To see what you are being charged:
- Open the GBP project where auto-reply is enabled.
- Open the review auto-reply settings and look for any credit usage note shown next to the feature.
- Open your account billing or credit usage area and review the activity log after a few replies have been sent.
- Compare your credit balance before and after a reply to see how many credits it used.
Tip: Test with a single new review. The change in your balance after one reply is your exact credits per reply.
💵 Converting Credits Into Real-World Dollars
Credits are included in your subscription, so the dollar value depends on your plan. You can work out an estimate with this formula:
- Cost per credit = your plan price divided by the number of credits included per billing period.
- Cost per reply = credits used per reply multiplied by your cost per credit.
- Monthly cost = cost per reply multiplied by the number of reviews you expect to receive.
For example, with made-up numbers for illustration only: if a plan costs $100 and includes 1,000 credits, each credit is worth $0.10. If one reply used 2 credits, it would cost about $0.20, and 50 replies in a month would cost about $10. Replace these with the values from your own plan and usage log.
If you buy extra credits as a top-up, use the price of that top-up pack instead of your plan price to get the cost per credit.
🧮 Ways to Keep Auto-Reply Costs Predictable
- Estimate your volume: Check how many new reviews each location usually receives per month.
- Enable it where it matters: Turn auto-reply on only for locations with frequent reviews if you want to limit credit use.
- Monitor your balance: Check credit usage after the first week to confirm it matches your estimate.
- Review manually when needed: For sensitive or negative reviews, you may prefer to write the response yourself.
📊 Reporting Across Multiple GBP Projects
Each GBP project tracks its own data, including keyword rankings and GBP score. Because of this, results are normally viewed project by project. Do not assume a single combined report with an average keyword rank and average GBP score is available on every plan. Ask our team to confirm what is available for your account (see below).
In the meantime, you can build a combined view yourself:
- Open each GBP project and note its average keyword rank and GBP score for the same date range.
- Export or download each project's report if the option is available, or copy the figures into a spreadsheet.
- List one project per row, with columns for average rank and GBP score.
- Calculate the average of each column to get your overall figures.
For a more accurate result, consider a weighted average. For example, if one location tracks 50 keywords and another tracks 10, weighting by keyword count prevents the smaller project from skewing the overall rank.
✅ Best Practices for Multi-Location Reporting
- Use the same date range for every project.
- Track a consistent set of keyword types across locations so the averages are comparable.
- Save your spreadsheet as a template and update it monthly.
- Record your credit usage alongside performance so you can see the cost of auto-replies against results.
🛟 Need Help?
If you want to confirm the exact credits your plan uses per auto-reply, or ask whether a combined multi-project report is available for your account, our team can check for you. If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be instantly connected with a member of our team.