Yelp Notification Service

[Joe Mink]

Hi All,

I'm currently using a Review Acquisition and Notification service for several of my clients, but lately I've noticed that I'm not receiving Yelp notifications. In fact, I just checked one of my client's Yelp profiles and noticed 3 new reviews within the last week, none of which my service notified me about. I've had this happen a few times before, but I'm ready to move on at this point.

Is anyone using a service that does an excellent job of providing new review notifications for Yelp, Facebook and Google?

Here's the reply I got from my current service: Are all the ORM services having this issue?

Our monitoring of Yelp reviews is limited to what Yelp provides via their public API. Yelp seems to be increasingly limiting the data that solutions like ours can draw from their API so that they can charge for this data.

Therefore, we cannot guarantee that all or any particular Yelp reviews will be automatically pulled into our system.


Thanks,
Joe

 

[Tim Colling]

We use Grade.us for this for our clients. We haven't had that sort of issue, as far as I know.

 

[Joe Mink]

Hi Tim,
Thanks for chiming in! That's the service I use and that was the response I got from their customer support. Here's a follow-up:

Hi Joe,

Our monitoring of Yelp reviews is limited to what Yelp provides via their public API. Yelp seems to be increasingly limiting the data that solutions like ours can draw from their API so that they can charge for this data.
Therefore, we cannot guarantee that all or any particular Yelp reviews will be automatically pulled into our system. To get missing Yelp reviews in your "Review Stream", it is currently possible to manually add missing reviews via the "Add a Review Manually" feature under Dashboard > Reviews > Add a Review Manually.​

 

[Tim Colling]

Oh. Well, that's sort of a kick in the pants, isn't it?

Still, if they're relying on an API and not scraping (which would probably be a legal problem) then maybe their hands are tied.

 

[Jon Hall]

Hi Joe,

Sorry for the trouble there. We do rely on Yelp's Developer API for monitoring, and we have long had to describe our Yelp monitoring as "limited" for that reason.

Yelp has been shrinking the review data they make available via the Developer API in order to monetize that data through their "Knowledge Partner" program rolled out late last year.

If you get lots of Yelp reviews and require outside monitoring of them, the only solutions with comprehensive Yelp data access are those offered by current Yelp Knowledge Partners: https://www.yelp.com/knowledge

Tim is right: our hands are tied on this one. We have reviewed the Knowledge Partner program but we remain somewhat "opinionated" about where the value in our solution lies and what it should cost. We therefore believe the Yelp program does not make sense for the majority of our customers at this time.

Jon