I've had experience with Yodle and ReachLocal, two resellers with less than stellar reputations for years and more recently via this article:
Small Businesses Search in Vain for Web-Ad Help - WSJ
The bad experience stories started cropping up years ago and they continue.
Some issues: All from experience:
1. Yodel and RL both resold google adwords at markups that were roughly 2 to 2.5 times actual costs. I saw that over several campaigns on a continuous basis.
2. Their reporting to clients actually obfuscates (hides) the true valuable data. They take google's data and repackage it. What you get from yodel (or RL) is vastly inferior in terms of helpful data than what adwords provides directly.
3. All the campaigns I saw were run on what is described as "broad keyword match". That is the least effective and potentially most costly way to do things. Lot of costs --little impact.
4. A lot of ads are run on Name or branding search terms. Listen on those calls. A ton of them are from non customers...vendors or other types of calls. What a friggin waste of money. I believe they do this purposefully. We've run campaigns and monitored these type calls.. Incredible waste of money via the Yodel/RL campaigns.
5. Neither yodle or RL ever adjusted the adwords campaign. Virtually one of the first things one does with an adwords campaign over time is to adjust it to get better ROI on the terms that count. The yodel/RL campaigns were geared to spending maximum dollars without regard for value to the customer
6. I'm extremely suspicious of the underlying relationships between the resellers and google insofar as what occurs with the establishment of documents that advertise and display a tracking number. Here is why:
I saw on several RL campaigns that a large number of web documents were created with the smb brand name, correct address and the tracking phone number...different than the actual number. I monitored and watched this during a period when Google's Local ALGO was creating a LOT of duplicate records that were messing with local smb's local presence.
But the smb's I followed didn't have a problem. meanwhile all across the web Local Dup records were being created via similar phenomena. But I couldn't find this via what RL was doing. I tracked down other RL accts....saw the citation type information with a "tracking phone number" but couldn't find DUPES.
What the heck was going on???? Everyone else was getting dupes.
I suspect RL and Yodel would get control of the account and pass the info to google. Google created some kind of filter wherein the web documents/citation type data with the tracking numbers would get filtered out of the record for that business.
Now that is my suspicion. As much of this that occurred, I couldn't find a dupe. And boy oh boy oh boy did I search.
Soooooo.....While I firmly believe you better work very hard to maintain clean citation records with consistent data....I also think that google and some of its reseller partners sneakily worked around this...
....and nobody knew about it.
Now on one particular Yodel acct here are some things I experienced:
1. They sold the customer on the following:
A. Organic optimization
B. Local Optimization
C. An adwords campaign.
Specifically on the organic campaign...lets say the business service is a Carpet sales, repair and cleaning for a city like Topeka. And lets also say the store is located in a pretty small neighborhood...called smallburg, located within Topeka.
Yodel optimized for smallburg carpet "phrases". That stunk. There are no searches for such a limited geo perspective. It was a waste.
Yodel promised the client optimization on the LOCAL side...so the client could show in Google maps, get pinned results...have a site that would show with reviews etc for carpet type searches.
Yodel DID NOTHING. NOTHING. No local visibility. NOTHING.
But why should they? If the smb was showing better in organic/results of any type it would negate clicks on ads.
That is where the resellers interests are in exact opposite interests than the business.
Finally of course, Yodel's adwords costs were about 2.3-2.5 times google's adwords costs. A tremendous waste of money.
Need I say more?
Just recently the first client's hijacked Places (now G+) page came under my management again. And their local rankings are almost at the same place as before Yodle messed around.
).
