Throughout our technology transformation, one of the most impactful tools we utilize is brand reputation management. In the past, communication was primarily in one direction; the media or company spoke to the customer through traditional controlled media, i.e., TV, radio, print ads, editorials, spotlights, and the like. The consumer read, listened, and watched, but didn’t have a way to verify the information they had learned or a direct channel back to the source. Sure, you could write a letter to the company’s customer service department or a letter to the editor, explaining your negative experience, but beyond using a stamp or walking into the corporate office to voice your concerns, options were limited. This allowed the media and brands to control the dialogue and left consumers in the dark and isolated. With the birth of the internet, and specifically Web 2.0, this interaction changed.
Finally, the individual had a voice and a public forum to share their opinions. Companies like Yelp, Amazon, eBay, and Trip Advisor became trusted sources that offered customers a voice and platform to share feedback, be heard, and protect themselves from picking the wrong provider. Corporations had no choice but to join these new virtual communities and take ownership of their customers’ experiences. To become a trusted company, the consumer expected to see 4-5 star ratings while conducting their intent research online. Reviews quickly became a key decision factor when picking one company over another. Today, that list of trusted sites has grown, including Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), Better Business Bureau, Angi, Nextdoor, and niche review sites like Houzz, SolarReviews, BestCompany, WebMD, etc., which were established to provide customers with safer solutions based on industry or interest. As a result, service providers popped up to help companies ask for reviews, respond, and report from a single source, such as Birdeye, Hatch, and Podium, among others. Reviews became important, if not crucial, and just a one-star review could send clients into full crisis mode. What started out with the best of intentions gradually declined and became a victim of fraud, just like other digital platforms. The problem today is that, with so many different sources and unverified reviews, how did we really know if they were legitimate? From old employees to competitors, bots to paid services, the industry dirtied the concept, creating a void of distrust on both sides. What do I mean? Let’s break it down.
Yelp
This sorry excuse for a company should not only make them ashamed of themselves but also put them on trial for unethical business practices. What started out as the number one most trusted free review platform has become the plague of the industry. Somewhere along the way, they forgot that their core value was to help share the truth and protect consumers. What if I told you that there is zero oversight or validation on Yelp? Anyone can create an account and start making reviews. Not only that, but anyone can create an unverified business page and do so when one isn’t found that they want to post a review for. Then business owners are expected to claim that page to be able to reply or update business information, but how can we trust that the person who claimed the page is in fact the business owner? Anyone can create a Gmail or fake website that looks like a reputable company and essentially steal leads or misinform the public. There is no EIN or formal paperwork required; you just need an email address, phone number, and URL, and then you’re in. Think about how many scam emails you receive in a week from companies pretending to be PayPal, USPS, or your bank, with email templates that look shockingly real in design and all the way through to click/login. The only way to tell that these emails are NOT from the real entity is by looking at the email address they were sent from. If it is not the official domain, then it’s bogus. Over the past decade, we have had multiple clients with official business pages share other customer-created pages with slight variations that cause customer confusion and brand heartache, i.e., maybe the address they enter is wrong, so Yelp creates a new listing using that Yelper’s data when in fact the real business already has a profile. That being said, it wasn’t hard for a customer to tell while searching which profile was the official brand because those profiles had a company logo. Pro-advertising options were available to boost your company in search results by location, competitive keywords, and overall impression share. And truth be told, I had some success with Yelp advertising for a period of time (2015–2019), seeing positive results for restaurants and solar companies. My only complaint was that the cost per click was outrageous and far higher than other paid sources like Google, resulting in an unfavorable cost per conversion. When I first broached the topic with one of the reps, they shared that I could change my strategy to focus not on website visits but instead on free quote requests inside of the platform. And it worked. My solar cost per solar lead decreased. We started to share results with other clients and increased efforts to drive positive reviews to this source over others.
Once we had a few clients advertising, I noticed a trend. Unless clients replied within 1 hour of the initial inquiry, the chances of reaching them declined dramatically. Also, the biggest problem was that although the customer filled out a free quote request, we (the client) didn’t have any personal contact information, i.e., a phone number or email address. The only way to communicate with that lead was through the Yelp platform, making it impossible to nurture leads (email or text automations) or truly understand the conversion rates without manual reporting (and even then, that wasn’t the big picture because too many factors contributed with regard to lead-to-speed, and unless we can get that person into the CRM, understanding the true value is just not possible). That, coupled with Yelp starting to upsell other paid advertisers on the quote form, made it shady. For example, a customer could request a quote from my solar company, and then at the end they would see other competitors and be asked if they wanted more quotes from them. It was great for Yelp, essentially allowing them to sell more leads to the same consumer, but not good for the company that the customer had initially been interested in. Other solar companies will now swarm them, making it less likely that I will be able to contact them.
Example:
Before long, Yelp was selling every type of feature: now companies had to pay to block other advertisers from appearing on their companies’ page; they had to pay for a call-to-action button (CALL US); they had to pay 
for image carousels to control what customers saw, i.e., company-approved pictures vs. posted pictures from Yelpers. Even then, it wasn’t egregious. Sure, they needed to monetize the platform, and these were ways to do that. The single biggest problem was that Yelp does not verify that reviewers were real people physically located in the area of whatever companies they chose to review. Yelp has refused to remove numerous instances of fake reviews on client accounts despite the agency’s ability to provide solid evidence that the reviewer was not a real customer. In fact, they often will not show real reviews from customers that have less than three total Yelp reviews. Ok, so let me just make sure I understand. You (YELP) will charge my client for every click and believe yourself to be the trusted source of truth, but then when we come to you and can prove beyond reasonable doubt that these 1-3 star reviews are fake, crickets? In my mind, it’s senseless to prioritize the person who isn’t paying for your platform. Because they don’t verify whether a customer is real, leaving a real review based on real experience, they also can’t verify those discrepancies aren’t real. And then when we can prove that a positive 4-5 star review was from a real customer (contract signed), it gets hidden because they are not commonly engaging on your platform? Not ok. That just boils down to a corrupted and broken one-sided pay-to-play model. The icing on the cake? In 2020, they started to charge companies $1 per day to showcase their company logo on their business listings. So now a small mom & pop must spend $30 a month just to show a logo so that customers can trust that they are, in fact, on the official profile page?
So let me get this straight: just to have a logo, block competitors, and add details about your brand, before you even start paid search, your cost as a business owner is $6 per day or $2,190 per year? That’s excessive; wouldn’t you agree? Just for the privilege, rather than the opportunity, to present your brand to eager Yelpers seeking trusted solutions? As well, Yelp no longer allows advertisers to pick the type of ad they want to run. So instead of driving free quote requests inside the platform, it’s blended together with website clicks, call clicks, and free quote requests. So much for spending your money how you want to.
Now that I’m on my soapbox, let’s dive deeper into a current solar client’s self-managed campaign from July/August 2023. Now, the first thing to always be on the lookout for is when companies blend date ranges to make their data look better. See below the total Ad Contribution: We had 217 ads over the last 12 months (spending $44,358 at a cost per click of $30 and a CPM of $208.39!). On the same page, Yelp is also reporting Last 30 Days results of 23 leads from paid ads. Leads include CTA clicks, messages, website visits, and calls, but again, verification comes into play here: who is vetting whether or not those metrics actually converted into leads? Readers, from what we learned thus far in The Covert Code, you should be asking yourself, 1) How do we know if the clicks or calls were real people rather than bots, or worse, solicitors? 2) Did these calls happen, and were they truly qualified? 3) What is the average cost per lead, or cost per sale, from this paid source? In the following example, we will use Google Analytics to validate clicks for CallRail phones and a manual count of Yelp inbox messages. Let’s get started:
In this example, the client hasn’t been with the agency for a full year. Let’s look at that sample size over the last 30 days to assess the true value of the campaign. Note: Of all times to pull an audit, and to be fair to our vendor, we are choosing a time period smack dab in the middle of the solar season and amidst one of the hottest heat waves ever reported in Arizona. Our expectations are that the data should be better than ever, right? Wrong.
Of the 29 total leads reported — 5 calls, 13 website visits, 11 messages, and 0 CTA clicks—for a total of 29 leads — 23 from paid ads and 6 organic ads 
(but no, they don’t break down whether those are clicks, calls or messages.) First, I went to CallRail and was only able to attribute Yelp as the source for 1 call over that period of time, not 5. Similarly, GoogleAnalytics G4 only shows 7 users and 8 sessions, not 13. Finally, when reviewing each message manually inside of the Yelp system itself, we only count 10 and not 11. Wait, WHAT? Even inside Yelp, the numbers don’t match. More questions than answers emerged; the numbers were just not adding up, so I wrote to my rep to find out.
To add more fuel to my fire, while searching for my client on Yelp (physically located in Oahu, Hawaii), I was served sponsored ad results for solar companies in Peoria, Arizona. Isn’t that just asking for poor results by allowing third-party entities to review using bots, control the dialogue, click on ads, and inflate Yelps numbers? What you would expect is that, as you are physically targeting people living in Peoria, someone outside of that geo-region would see organic search rather than paid search because, in all of your good sense, would you pay for someone outside of your targeted locations to click on your ad? Remind you of someone? (Hint: It should remind you of our friends, Google and Microsoft). But this is way worse because not only can we not control the settings (option to change from default to presently located), we can’t even control the ads we run (calls vs. clicks vs. free quotes).
So now, having measured results
against each of my tracking platforms and evaluated their quality, I’m left with 1 unqualified call, 0 website conversions, and a handful of message replies that confirmed no sales from the client. I went to the overview of ad performance to see the total cost. The client spent $3,614.37 in total, and the reported clicks of 148 are just to the profile page from inside the platform. That’s why it shows 153 page visits on the total page; those other 5 clicks came from direct sources and were not tracked as ad clicks. The result was a $248 cost per thousand impressions and a meager 1% click-through rate (remember, best practice with CTR is that if it’s below 2%, the ad needs to change). HARD PASS. This is straight-up fraud. So what do we do about it? Let’s make them open their books and refund all the business owners they have lied to, and, unless they agree to ethical business practices, let’s burn it to the ground.
| Period | Ad impress | clicks | cost-per-click | Ad spend | CMP | CTR |
| Aug 1 – Aug 11 | 5,612 | 64 | $24.37 | $1,559.90 | $277.96 | 1.14% |
| Jul 13 – Jul 31 | 8,940 | 84 | $24.46 | $2,054.47 | $229.81 | 0.94% |
| Total | 14,552 | 148 | $24.42 | $3,614.37 | $248.38 | 1.02% |
NextDoor
On the other side of the coin, we have Nextdoor. They’re everything that Yelp isn’t. Not only do they verify that every business is in fact the owner by asking for an EIN and additional information, but they also offer the same level of protection to each homeowner by ensuring that those with access to their community are physically located in that neighborhood. And no, a Nextdoor user cannot see the community posts from anyone outside of their approved location. Nextdoor also does not charge businesses to be listed and offers ways to control ad location, reach, and more. That being said, the agency still has experienced inflated click numbers inside the platform, i.e., we haven’t been able to match up with great accuracy the reported total clicks and traffic from the platform in G4 (even with a UTM). Overall, it’s better than it was before, and depending on your company’s industry, goals, and budget, a paid campaign could be effective even when accounting for the inflated reported traffic.
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business, GMB)
GMB is one of the most underutilized brand management platforms around. That might be in part
due to how complicated it can be to pass verification for your business’s location and ownership. In some instances, companies are required to upload a picture from the location (yes, Google can use technology to identify that the picture was taken at the latitude and longitude of the location you are trying to verify). Other ways to verify in the past included a postcard being mailed to the physical location (we miss those days). One of the limitations of the platform is changing your business’s location, as the only option is to close the current listing, which can negatively impact a company’s search as customers seeking the business might see that profile only appear over the new one (this is getting better but can happen so be on the lookout!) In addition, GMB doesn’t have a clean way for a business owner to claim multiple businesses from the same address. For example, if you have a few brand names all with the same office (all you entrepreneurs are nodding, yes?), you’re out of luck unless you have a unique suite number for each; you can’t register them.
One of my favorite tools in GMB is the posts section. This allows businesses to share updates or content that is seen on the business profile similarly to how a traditional feed is set up for other social media outlets. It is a solid one-stop-shop for site reviews, business information, and updates. Each post appears below the Reviews and has incredible off-site SEO value. Don’t miss out on free reach!
