Jon thanks for chiming in. Your system does sound cool. But it's all based on sending them to a webpage on grade.us. This helps you pick which review sites to show based on which ones have no recent activity, yes? Very scalable.
Exactly. For this crowd, I should note that our marketers typically
white-label the service and have the funnel pages live at their own domain (though still hosted on our cloud infrastructure) or embed them in client websites. That means they can provide the service to their clients without their clients discovering us. It also ties into the point about referrers.
It would be interesting to have a study done about if emailing a customer vs sending them to your web funnel generates more reviews. And how quickly after the experience you have to send the invitation.
Agreed. We are building out better analytics as I write this so that we can start to provide some of this data. Unfortunately when working with scores of third-party sites, it isn't easy!
And I would love someone to challenge Darren Shaws comments about how you have to send emails to customers or hand them a card that describes how to find your business naturally and then leave a review. Look it's very cumbersome.
Review Handout Generator from Whitespark and Local Visibility System Why does he says this, because yelp, Google+ and others look at the referring IP address and count them as spam when they come from the same url. So a study of rankings on Google and internally on the review sites themselves when using a funnel page would be awesome.
I wouldn't challenge Darren
But the point about referrers is, I think, exaggerated. Why?
1. Yelp is unlikely to publish reviews from new users no matter what. Our approach is to discourage non-Yelpers from posting to Yelp at all. Active Yelpers, on the other hand, are already vetted users, so I doubt the referrer matters that much at that point. Ditto for Google.
2. Also, I would venture a guess that a referrer is unlikely to be flagged unless it's sending a spammer-sized volume of reviews that otherwise looks suspicious.
3. Finally, if we discover that review sites are blocking legitimate reviews because of referrer, we can pretty handily obscure the referrer. I don't like that tactic, though, and so far it hasn't been necessary.
To Darren and Phil's points, there are several good solutions and multitudinous awful ones. I think GFS, Grade.us and Phil's handouts all do it right, but each with a different focus. GFS is "feedback first" and therefore has great customer service value. Grade.us focuses on getting reviews on third-party sites first to realize the marketing/SEO value. Phil's handouts reduce the number of steps (for customers) and moving parts (for business owners). All good.
(BTW, Darren, if you haven't checked us out, I'd love to give you the VIP tour of Grade.us to see what you think. Phil recommended that I reach out to you on this but cautioned that you probably have limited bandwidth.)
