About three years ago, Yelp launched its revenue estimation tool to enable local businesses to compare their Yelp-driven business to the national average. It would multiply customer leads sent from Yelp each month by the business’s average revenue per customer lead. It also included the average spend per customer for each business category for reference.
Yelp recently made some improvements to the tool, including personalized results, and more control. The tool now includes three separate inputs to help business owners adjust and refine their estimate based on their unique business.
“When it comes to calculating revenue per customer, we let you tell us what makes the most sense for your business,” Yelp’s Darnell Holloway recently wrote in a post on the Yelp for Business Owners blog. “You can edit these metrics at any time to receive an updated revenue estimate.”
“Hitting ‘Calculate’ will multiply your answers by the number of customer leads Yelp has generated for your business,” he explained. “The result is an estimated revenue opportunity. Track your estimated revenue over time and identify areas for improvement or opportunities for growth!”
To take advantage of the tool, simply log into your Yelp for Business Owners account.
Two years ago, Pinterest launched Place Pins adding a travel magazine-like experience to the popular social/search site. These enabled users to see information like the address of a place, phone numbers, etc. in a format designed to look natural to the Pinterest experience.
This week, Pinterest announced the update of seven billion pins with new location data and info. This is in response to travel becoming increasingly popular on the site/app.
“With these updates, it’s easier to visit the places you’ve Pinned,” Pinterest says. “In just a tap, Pinners can get directions through Google and Apple maps, call a business, visit a website, view hours of operations and top reviews from people who’ve been there.”
“As a discovery engine, we’re making it easier to discover new places to visit, restaurants to try and sights to see in your city and around the world,” it adds. “Now, when you save a Pin, we’ll show you other places to visit nearby on a map and other Pins people have saved from the same place.”
As Pinterest puts more focus on this local search type of experience, it’s bound to open up new opportunities for businesses with physical locations.
Pinterest is already presenting itself more and more as a search service (including to advertisers), and now that Pinterest is monetizing itself with promoted and buyable pins, it’s hard to imagine that some of this won’t translate to place pins as well.
Considering that most small businesses consider phone call to be the most important success metric, Pinterest’s expansion of Place Pins is surely a welcome move forward.
Here’s a look at the 20 top pinned places on Pinterest:
1. Positano, Campania, Italy
2. Musha Cay Island, Bahamas
3. Hanoi, Vietnam
4. Havasu Falls, Grand Canyon, Arizona, U.S.A.
5. Petrohué Falls, Chile
6. Jarlshof, Shetland, Scotland
7. Kyoto, Japan
8. Port Fairy, Victoria, Australia
9. Glacier National Park, Montana, U.S.A.
10. Tulum, Mexico
11. Lisbon, Portugal
12. New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.
13. Kjeragbolten, Norway
14. Marrakesh, Morocco
15. Cape Town, South Africa
16. Somoto’s Canyon, Nicaragua
17. Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
18. Milford Sound, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand
19. Reykjavik, Iceland
20. New York City, New York, U.S.A.
It looks like Google Maps vandalism and Google’s way of addressing it may have led to a massive rankings shift in local search results, which can obviously have a major impact on businesses.
Last week, news came out that Google Maps had been tampered with to lead users to the White House and other locations when a user searched for certain racist queries. As soon as this was pointed out in a Washington Postarticle, Google released a statement.
“Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologize for any offense this may have caused. Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly,” it said.
Not long after that, Google said:
“We were deeply upset by this issue, and we are fixing it now. We apologize this has taken some time to resolve, and want to share more about what we are doing to correct the problem. At Google, we work hard to bring people the information they are looking for, including information about the physical world through Google Maps. Our ranking systems are designed to return results that match a person’s query. For Maps, this means using content about businesses and other public places from across the web. But this week, we heard about a failure in our system—loud and clear. Certain offensive search terms were triggering unexpected maps results, typically because people had used the offensive term in online discussions of the place. This surfaced inappropriate results that users likely weren’t looking for.”
“Our team has been working hard to fix this issue. Building upon a key algorithmic change we developed for Google Search, we’ve started to update our ranking system to address the majority of these searches—this will gradually roll out globally and we’ll continue to refine our systems over time. Simply put, you shouldn’t see these kinds of results in Google Maps, and we’re taking steps to make sure you don’t.”
As previously reported, That “key algorithmic change” involved tackling Googlebombs – the practice of making sites rank for certain, often derogatory searches by linking to the site behind “obscure or meaningless queries.” The most famous Google bomb involved George W. Bush’s page ranking for “miserable failure”.
Google fixed the Google bomb issue a long time ago didn’t it? How could this have happened? Here’s how industry veteran Danny Sullivan explained it in a post last week:
To understand more, say Google knows about a local sporting goods store. The owner of that store might explain in the description it provides to Google Maps that it sells baseball, football and hockey equipment. It also sells other sporting equipment, but if these things aren’t also listed in its description or on its associated web site, the store might not be deemed relevant for those things.
With the Pigeon Update, Google sought to correct this. Imagine that some customer of the site wrote a blog post saying that the store was a great place to get skiing equipment. Google, seeing the business named in that post, might effectively add this information to the business listing, making it relevant for skiing equipment. To our understanding, there doesn’t even have to be a link to the business site or listing in Google Maps. Using a business name alone might be enough to create the connection.
It appears Google’s fix ended up creating a new problem, at least for many businesses who had gotten used to their local result rankings. As Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points out, there has been a lot of talk in local search forums about changes that have led to “massive ranking” shifts. He attributes this to the Googlebomb fix, as most discussion of the changes began right after Google’s apology.
Here’s a sample of what Google Local Specialist Linda Buquet said in a post at Local Search Forum. “Results seem to be more national organic and less localized. PLUS even if you set location to where you client is, the organic results you see are all for the actual location you are searching from and you don’t get results that are localized to the search location setting. PLUS packs are smaller and more scattered if you don’t use a GEO modifier. Just all kinds of changes!…the majority of consumers search without GEO. So most consumers are going to be seeing theses smaller pack/less localized results.”
Local search guy Mike Blumenthal talks more about the “screwy” location results here.
It’s entirely possible that Google will get everything back in order, but as we’ve seen with many updates in the past, that can often take a lot of time, and Google is probably more concerned about the vandalism that led to all of this more than some shuffled rankings for the time being. This has been tremendously pad PR for the company, not only due to the highly offensive, racist nature of the most recent case, but also the fact that it is only the latest example in a string of attacks on Google Maps. That’s simply not good for the reputation of such an important product.
Unfortunately, businesses have little they can do to recover their listings until Google makes changes on its end.
To be clear, it’s not a sure thing that the Googlebomb fix is actually what caused the “massive” changes in local results. It’s a theory that’s out there, mainly due to the timing and the location-related nature of both things.
Buquet said in a Google+ comment last night, “I mentioned that at 1st too, but this does not seem related now that I think more about it. They were going to Google bomb it. But Chiropractor and Dentist are not terms they would Google bomb. And the whole layout is different for non-GEO terms, which does not seem to jive with the White House deal.”
Ultimately, the actual cause doesn’t necessarily matter to businesses who have to deal with the blow Google has dealt with. It seems like things acre screwed up enough that it will need to come down to a fix on Google’s end. Will it happen? In another Google+ post last week, the issue of location settings was brought up, and Google’s John Mueller said that nothing had changed, and that they “use a bunch of factors for geotargeting,” but after others (including Blumenthal) chimed in, Mueller said he’d double check”.
Facebook announced the launch of its local awareness ads last fall. These enable local business advertisers to target Facebook users based on their location. If a person is near the business, Facebook can advertise to them. Now, the adds have a new feature that will enable the user to interact directly with the business.
“Local awareness ads are built to be more cost-effective than traditional advertising channels like newspaper while offering more precise targeting and greater reach,” the company explained upon launch. “We think they’re the best way for local businesses to reach people near them, and the best way for people who use Facebook to discover more useful things in their area.”
When the ads were released, they came with a “Get Directions” button option.
“After creating an ad, a Page owner can simply enter their business’s address and the radius around which they’d like to reach, and Facebook will use that information in order to create an audience comprised of people who live in that area, or were recently near the business,” a spokesperson for Facebook explained in an email at the time. “For more precise targeting, marketers can also choose the age and gender of their audience. And with convenient call-to-action options such as ‘Get Directions’ or ‘Like Page,’ business owners are able to easily prompt ad engagement.”
Now there’s another interaction option: Call Now.
“Our new local awareness objective is the first Facebook ad objective created explicitly for local businesses like yours,” Facebook tells businesses on its landing page. “Ads can be created right from your Page, in just a few minutes. And by adding a ‘Call Now’ button, customers can call you right from your ad in News Feed. Use it today to get more sales, new customers and great results.”
When a person clicks the button in an ad, the phone automatically dials the business.
Facebook says local awareness ads are optimized to let you reach the most amount of people for the least amount of money. You can see the results of the ads right on your Page in the notifications panel, where you can see metrics like people reached and clicks. You can specifically see Call Now clicks.
Recent research from BrightLocal found that business consider phone calls to be the most valued success metric of their online marketing efforts, compared to web traffic, search rankings, and significantly over customers actually walking through the door or inquiring via their website.
On why businesses value phone calls so highly compared to these other metrics, BrightLocal CEO Myles Anderson told WebProNews, “Firstly there are many local businesses that don’t cater to walk-in customers (e.g. gardeners, plumbers, accountants, therapists, mobile-masseuses) but they all have a phone,” Anderson says. “Secondly, calls convert better than online enquiries. Customers are more engaged (they’ve taken the time to call) and a business has a greater opportunity to understand the customer’s need and propose the best solution for them. Thirdly, speaking to a customer on the phone is often cheaper than dealing with customers in-location. So if you can pre-qualify/pre-sell a customer on the phone then it’s a lower cost per sale.”
We recently talked about how Facebook is actually doing quite a few things that can benefit small businesses and what they can get out of the social network. The new Call Now button could perhaps be one of the most beneficial yet.
Back in July, Google launched an algorithm update that shook up local search results in the U.S. While Google never gave it an official name like Panda or Penguin that we’re aware of, Search Engine Land started calling it the “Pigeon” update, and that’s what people in the industry have, for the most part, adopted for it.
That update has now reportedly started rolling out to other countries including the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Back in July when the update launched, people noticed missing 7 packs in some types of local results, and Google confirmed the update, saying that it “ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search, along with search reatures such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms, and more.”
The update was also said to improve distance and location parameters.
Search Engine Land is now reporting that the update has significantly affected local businesses in the new regions, and points out that Google is, once again, making major algorithm changes around the holidays, which it had pretty much stopped doing until recently.
As we’ve talked about in the past, Google updates around the holidays can deliver major blows to businesses at the most important sales time of the year. Now, not only are they rolling this update out, they’ve been slowly rolling out a new version of Penguin.
Yelp reviews can have a tremendous impact – for better or for worse – on a business. They can dictate whether or not a customer decides to visit. This is one of the reasons the site/app is so controversial with businesses. There may actually be more to reviews than meets the eye, however.
Yelp has been offering researchers access to its data in the form of the Yelp Dataset Challenge, which includes data from Phoenix, Las Vegas, Madison, Waterloo, and Edinburgh. It’s made up of data from 42,153 businesses, 320,002 business attributes, 31,617 check-in sets, 252,898 users, 955,999 edge social graph, 403,210 tips, and 1,125,458 reviews.
With the challenge, Yelp has been calling on academics to break ground in research with its data. Explaining the challenge, Yelp says:
How well can you guess a review’s rating from its text alone? Can you take all of the reviews of a business and predict when it will be the most busy, or when the business is open? Can you predict if a business is good for kids? Has Wi-Fi? Has Parking? What makes a review useful, funny, or cool? Can you figure out which business a user is likely to review next? How much of a business’s success is really just location, location, location? What businesses deserve their own subcategory (i.e., Szechuan or Hunan versus just “Chinese restaurants”), and can you learn this from the review text? What makes a tip useful? What are the differences between the cities in the dataset? There is a myriad of deep, machine learning questions to tackle with this rich dataset.
Researchers from Yahoo took Yelp up on the challenge, utilizing 200,000 of the available reviews to look at social signals that can be gleaned from Yelp, which can provide a better understanding of consumers’ interactions with businesses on the popular review site. As they note, Yelp isn’t just about the actual reviews.
In a blog post, Yahoo Labs researchers Saeideh Bakhshi, David A. Shamma, and Partha Kanuparthy write:
People on Yelp also log in and express their opinions, not as reviews, but as votes on reviews. In effect, it’s a higher granularity than a Flickr “favorite” or a Facebook “like,” as Yelpers cast their votes with the distinct sentiments of cool, funny, and/or useful. These votes are three kinds of “likes”; they are a minimal social signal that many online sites use for communication and recommendation. The three options that Yelp offers lets one investigate the implied meanings carried by these sentiments more accurately than many other social networks. But there’s something more here. In aggregate, a random person on Yelp might carry a running total of votes they have cast, including 469 useful votes, 192 cool votes, and 260 funny votes. The same could hold true for a venue. We began to wonder if we could understand something more from these votes; are they indicative of particular emotions? Do the votes represent some fingerprint of a Yelper or of an establishment?
They found that the way people vote on reviews (including the sentiment of the text) has a relationship with the tone of the text and the text’s rating, depending on vote type. They say there is deeper meaning in signals like “cool,” “useful,” and “funny,” than those labels suggest.
“While many would be correct in associating the useful and funny votes as representing reviews with the most amount of information or humor they contain, these signals are actually a proxy for negativity in reviews,” the researchers say. “A cool vote is more ambiguous in its meaning, but clearly associates with more positive reviews. Understanding these votes, or signals, and how they affect ratings can better inform customers as they come across reviews and take them into account for their own purposes; ultimately, they could alter one’s perception of a business, for better or worse.”
The main takeaways are as follows:
Reviews that were voted useful and/or funny tended to have lower user ratings and generally carry a negative tone.
Reviews deemed to be cool by users tend to have a positive tone and higher user ratings.
Reviews written by members who are active for longer periods of time tend to receive more votes. Readers tend to prefer long and objective reviews.
You can read the full research paper here. There is also some follow-up research available here.
Have you ever considered the impact of how non-reviewing Yelp users are contributing to your business’ reputation by their interactions with existing reviews? Does it make a significant difference in your opinion? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Yelp commissioned Nielsen to field a consumer survey on where Americans intend to do their holiday shopping this season and what gets them shopping at local businesses.
According to this, eight out of ten are likely to shop at local businesses during the holiday season, and about half of the local shoppers expect to spend over $100 at small businesses. 44% of those shoppers intend to begin their shopping ahead of Thanksgiving.
“And it’s not just retail businesses getting in on the action: six in ten local shoppers are looking to buy experience-based gifts such as a restaurant gift certificate, massage, or theater tickets,” writes Darnell Holloway on Yelp’s blog.
The company put together an infographic with these stats and more.
In Holloways’ blog post, there are tips for businesses to get more out of Yelp to prepare for the holiday season.
Facebook announced a new ad product for local businesses called Local Awareness ads. These let businesses find new customers by showing ads to groups of people who are near that business’s neighborhood.
“Local awareness ads are built to be more cost-effective than traditional advertising channels like newspaper while offering more precise targeting and greater reach,” the company explains. “We think they’re the best way for local businesses to reach people near them, and the best way for people who use Facebook to discover more useful things in their area.”
“After creating an ad, a Page owner can simply enter their business’s address and the radius around which they’d like to reach, and Facebook will use that information in order to create an audience comprised of people who live in that area, or were recently near the business,” a spokesperson for Facebook explains in an email. “For more precise targeting, marketers can also choose the age and gender of their audience. And with convenient call-to-action options such as ‘Get Directions’ or ‘Like Page,’ business owners are able to easily prompt ad engagement.
Local Awareness ads will begin rolling out via the Ads Create tool and API over the coming weeks. They’ll only be available in the U.S. at first, but Facebook says a global launch will come within months.
Google released a new series of videos under the banner “Bring Your Local Business Online”. They total thirty minutes, and give businesses advice for doing just that even without a website.
BIA/Kelsey is estimating that spending on local media by SMBs will reach $50.4 billion in 2015 at 35.8% of total local media spending. SMBs, it says, will allocate $37.7 billion of their local media spend to traditional media and $12.4 billion to digital.
According to the firm, national brands will spend $50.5 billion on local media in 2015, and will make up 35.9% of total local media spending. An additional $39.8 billion in local media spending will come from local brands that aren’t SMBs, it says.
SMBs, national brands, and non-SMB local businesses will each increase their local media spend by double-digit percentages, the report says.
BIA/Kelsey intends to present its findings later this month, offering the full edition of its forecast, which will cover twelve media segments, including: newspapers, radio, over-the-air TV, cable TV, out-of-home, direct mail, directories, magazines, online, mobile and social.
It will issue the forecast on the first day of the Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing conference, which starts on September 22nd. The timing for the annual forecast has been moved from the spring to the fall.
Groupon announced that it is giving local businesses a new time-based deals option that enables them to accept reservations or take appointments so they have more control over when customers actually show up.
The complaint about a lack of control is almost as old as Groupon itself. If too many people take advantage of a good deal at the same time, it can make for a chaotic period for a business ill prepared to handle the influx.
A Groupon spokesperson tells WebProNews, “Many business tell us that they’re interested in running a deal, but they don’t need us to bring them customers at certain times. This is why we’re launching a new time-based deals option for all local businesses that accept reservations or take appointments––enabling them to control exactly when customers come into their business.
“In addition to providing our merchants with predictability and certainty by bringing them customers exactly when they want them, we’re streamlining the experience for our customers by letting them know when they can use a deal before they buy it,” the spokesperson adds.
“Groupon is making it easier for people to buy and book what they want, when they want it and also providing local businesses with an important yield management tool that drives additional revenue,” said Julie Szudarek, senior vice president, Local Deals for Groupon. “Our new booking technology provides merchants even greater control over their deals to match the needs of their business and offers a tremendous customer experience. And as more and more businesses list their reservation and appointment inventory with us, it gives our customers another reason to always check Groupon first.”
Customers can make a reservation or appointment from the Groupon mobile app or Groupon.com when they purchase the deal or afterwards. With the appointment or reservation booked ahead of time, they won’t have to present a voucher when they show up to the business.
The feature is starting in the restaurant category, but will be expanded to others, including spas, classes, and activities, soon.
Yelp announced some big news late on Tuesday. They’ve increased the call limit on their API to 25,000 per day, and made it easier for developers to use, in addition to opening it up to all developers for free. In other words, anyone who wants to use Yelp data in their apps or website can now do so easily, without cost, and pull enough data to make actual useful Yelp-related features.
For Yelp, this means that it’s likely to see a big increase in the visibility of its content and its ads. For businesses, it means more people than ever are going to be exposed to reviews – positive and negative. Let the fun begin.
Is increased exposure of Yelp reviews good or bad for businesses? Tell us what you think.
Yelp has been pretty protective of its data, and today it has more competitors than ever. This, of course, includes Google, which has pretty much become its sworn enemy. Google used to use Yelp’s (and other sources’) reviews in its product in a way that essentially passed them off as Google’s own. Things have changed on that front, but Yelp still doesn’t think Google plays fair, and recently became an official complainant in a lengthy antitrust probe into the search giant’s business practices.
“I truly fear the landscape for innovation in Europe is infertile, and this is a direct result of the abuses Google has undertaken with its dominant position,” Yep CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told European Commission chief José Manuel Barroso in a letter. “While I laud the important work of your office and Vice-President Kroes in ensuring Europe is able to tap into the economic opportunity that the Internet industry is unleashing, it is my strong belief that such potential cannot be realized unless every possible step is taken to prevent abuse by dominant firms.”
Either way, opening up its API like it is should help Yelp better compete with everyone. It already has a significant brand, and when that and its content are plastered all over the place, that brand is bound to gain significance in consumers’ eyes. Yelp has already been integrated into some key places, including iOS, Mac OS X, Yahoo’s local search results, and the Pebble smartwatch.
“Thousands of companies have used Yelp’s API to build local information into their products and services, giving consumers even more access to great Yelp content, like Yelp review snippets, photos, ratings and business listing information,” says Yelp VP Business & Corporate Development Mike Ghaffary. “Developers have turned to Yelp because of our trusted, high-quality local data, which, through an empirical study, is shown to be more reliable and consistent than other sources of local data.”
Not everybody’s convinced that Yelp’s data is so reliable, but the study Ghaffary refers to is discussed in more detail by the company here. The study was done by Yelp itself, with findings presented back in November. It looked at how Yelp data “stacks up against the competition,” but looked at photos, and not reviews. The company said the reason for this was that not all the sites it looked at have the same concept of reviews, and it needed a measure of content that is comparable across sites. It also looked at business names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, dupes, and locations. Here are the stats:
There are a few things of note. First, TripAdvisor and Yellowbook do not have listings in some categories/geographies so they have a smaller set of samples. Second, fewer listings had websites than other types of data. This is at least partly because not all businesses have websites, so the maximum is less than 100%. Finally, one downside of our approach to scoring is that a missing listing gives you credit for not having a duplicate. This flaw in scoring combined with a fairly large number of listings outside of TripAdvisor’s main area of focus—79 Shopping businesses in Dublin, Ireland for example—likely inflate TripAdvisor’s “No Dupes” score.
The high-level story is that in terms of listing data Yelp and Google are closely matched and ahead of the other competition. Google wins out on finding business websites, which isn’t surprising given that crawling the web is part of its core business. On the other hand, Yelp is well ahead of Google in terms of photo content.
Clearly Yelp has some helpful data to offer developers beyond the reviews themselves, which will give them all the more reason to utilize the API, but it’s also going to mean greater access to those controversial reviews, and this is what businesses already critical of Yelp (and there are a lot of them) may be concerned with.
You probably know the story by now. Some businesses think Yelp is sabotaging their listings by burying positive reviews, sometimes accusing them of holding said reviews hostage if they don’t spend advertising dollars. We’ve seen such accusations come up time and time again for years, though nobody’s ever been able to offer any real evidence of this happening.
There is also always the concern about fake reviews. Yelp appears to do its best to weed these out, but just how successful they’ve been is anybody’s guess. Every so often they provide updates about adding consumer alerts for businesses they catch “red-handed,” but there’s no real confirmation that they’re catching all the fake stuff.
There is almost certainly a number of reviews that while not completely fake are misleading at best, or exaggerated by angry customers or people that frankly don’t really know what they’re talking about. That’s why celebrity Andrew Zimmern called Yelp reviews “worthless”.
Regardless, they’re about to be much more prevalent throughout the web and mobile app ecosystems, which will probably also lead to more of them being written in the first place – especially now that people can leave reviews from the phones.
Oh, and just so you know, people are trusting the reviews they read online more than ever. A recent study from BrightLocal found not only that people are turing to online reviews for local businesses more and more, but 88% say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That’s actually up from 79% last year. Only 13% said they don’t trust reviews as much.
Are you glad to see Yelp’s API open and expanded to any app that wants to take advantage? Let us know in the comments.
Groupon announced the launch of a point-of-sale hardware solution for local businesses called Gnome. It would compete with Square Stand/Register.
According to the company, the tablet stand will enable merchants to instantly recognize Groupon customers as they enter the store, and let them redeem Groupons. The solution will integrate with accounting programs like QuickBooks and Exero, and offer CRM tools, including the ability to customize marketing campaigns based on purchase history, and share customer feedback on social media. It will also let businesses respond to customer inquiries/comments.
CEO Eric Lefkofsky said, ‘“Gnome is an amazing piece of technology that plugs our merchants into the Web and helps them form relationships with every customer that walks in their front door. When it’s complete, Gnome will serve as an operating system for merchants to run their entire operation and enable them to create real-time promotions that bring customers into their business when they need them the most.”
“Gnome is an important step towards our long-term mission of creating a world where merchants are constantly connected to the Groupon local commerce platform,” he added.
Groupon redemption happens automatically using bluetooth, or customers can be searched for by name, barcode, or voucher number. Customers won’t need to have printed vouchers.
It logs cash transactions, accepts credit and debit card payments, and prints or emails receipts. It also calculates multiple tax rates, manages menu items, lets you view transaction history, and enables you to issue refunds. It even comes with preloaded menus and inventory lists for popular types of businesses. Ir comes with 24/7 live support.
Gnome will roll out to “tens of thousands” of merchants in the coming months.
Yelp announced on Wednesday that it has issued a new round of Consumer Alerts, the warnings that appear on businesses’ Yelp pages informing users that they’re not to be trusted. The company didn’t say how many it issued this time around, but it did call out a few businesses by name.
The company is also discouraging businesses from asking customers for reviews in-store, which many would no doubt argue is when the experience is freshest in their minds. As far as Yelp is concerned, asking for reviews is pretty much like spam.
“Unfortunately some businesses are trying to sneak through fake reviews in an effort to boost their reputations on Yelp and other review sites,” says Yelp’s Kristen Whisenand. “Others may be encouraging their customers to write reviews from the store, which may not sound all that bad until you ask yourself just how objective you’d be if you were at the dentist’s office and she dropped an iPad on your lap and asked you to write her a quick Yelp review. Solicited reviews are often biased and don’t result in the most accurate overall portrayal of that business. You can also be assured that businesses are almost never asking their unhappy customers for reviews.” Emphasis added.
Part of the problem (on Yelp’s end) with people leaving reviews from in stores is that they come from the same IP address. It would seem that reviews coming from a single IP address has been one of the biggest factors in the company determining when reviews are spammy. In fact, the company said right in its new post on the subject, that it “looks for businesses that have received a disproportionate number of spammy reviews, like those that originate from the same IP address.”
This was actually brought up on Bloomberg recently, when a business owner and a representative from Yelp each presented their side of the story. In that, Yelp’s Vincent Sollitto, VP of corporate communications, said: “Yelp has to recommend reviews that they find reliable. The reason that there are a number of positive reviews for Beverly’s [the aforementioned business owner] business that are not being recommended is because in fact ten of them came from the very IP address that was used to claim her business owner’s account, and one of them actually was for a one-star review of a competing business to hers. And so the problem is business owners try to game the system, and websites that don’t try to filter out or verify reliable reviews can get gamed. That’s probably why Yahoo decided to go ahead and use Yelp as the de facto standard for local search.”
Beverly, who runs a dog training service, responded, “First of all, in some cases, clients are at your house, and can be using your IP address to write something. That is possible. IP address isn’t the best judgment. People can be at a cafe and use IP address, you know. I don’t think the location of a person writing the review is relevant. I had one guy, for instance, that is in my five-star-deleted – i’ve had like 34 deleted five-star reviews now – I mean not recommended – and another fourteen that have been deleted. And meanwhile I only have seven five-star reviews up. So that’s a big ratio. We’re talking a fifty to seven ratio here. I had one guy that had to go to the library and open an account in order to be able to write a review for me because he didn’t have a computer service, and he wanted to be able to review me because I did good work with him, and he was very pleased, and Yelp removed his review because it seemed suspicious or whatever, but he’s a real person.”
Unless Bloomberg cut it out, Sollitto didn’t really acknowledge her comments about people legitimately using the same IP address.
“Don’t Ask for Reviews” is one of Yelp’s guidelines. They have a whole page on it in their support center.
Under the “Why does Yelp discourage businesses from asking for reviews?” section, it says:
1. Would-be customers might not trust you. Let’s face it, most business owners are only going to ask for reviews from their happy customers, not the unhappy ones. Over time, these self-selected reviews create bias in the business listing — a bias that savvy consumers can smell from a mile away. No business is perfect, and it’s impossible to please 100% of your customers 100% of the time.
2. Solicited reviews are less likely to be recommended by our automated software, and that will drive you crazy. Why aren’t these reviews recommended? Well, we have the unfortunate task of trying to help our users distinguish between real and fake reviews, and while we think we do a pretty good job at it with our fancy computer algorithms, the harsh reality is that solicited reviews often fall somewhere in between. Imagine, for example, the business owner who “asks” for a review by sticking a laptop in front of a customer and smilingly invites her to write a review while he looks over her shoulder. We don’t need these kinds of reviews, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when they aren’t recommended.
It later goes on to say, “There is an important distinction between ‘Hey, write a review about me on Yelp,’ [BAD] and ‘Hey, check us out on Yelp!’ [GOOD]. It’s the difference between actively pursuing testimonials and simply creating awareness of your business through social media outlets.”
Because, you know, you’re going to recommend unhappy users “check you out” on Yelp. What else is a customer going to do when they “check you out” on Yelp besides write a review? If you’re trying to create awareness about your business on social media, you’re not going to say, “Check us out on Yelp.” You’re going to say, “Check us out on Facebook” or “…on Twitter,” etc.
According to Yelp, recommending that your customers “check you out on Yelp” allows them to “review your online reputation without feeling like they’re being forced to write a review.”
So, go ahead and suggest that they review your reputation on Yelp after they’ve done business with you, because that will help them somehow?
“To an established Yelp community member, a reminder of your Yelp presence can act like a dog-whistle prompting them to share their feedback about your business with fellow Yelpers,” adds Yelp.
Oh. Just don’t suggest that they write a review!
If you’ve been encouraging people to leave reviews for your business while they’re actually at your business, don’t offer them up your own device to do it. Luckily, last year, Yelp added the ability for users to leave reviews from the Yelp app.
“Yelpers won’t have to wait until they get home to tell the world why their neighborhood barber is deserving of five shiny stars – they can do it directly from their phones, while they’re on-the-go,” a Yelp product manager wrote in a blog post at the time.
“We have zero tolerance for those who are trying to manipulate their online reputations in an effort to get ahead of hard-working business owners who are playing by the rules,” says Whisenand. “We encourage businesses to take a hands off approach when it comes to receiving reviews and take advantage of the free suite of tools Yelp provides business owners who are interested in joining the conversations that are happening about them online.”
What do you think of Yelp’s policy on asking for reviews? Have you suggested that customers “check you out” on Yelp? Did reviews resulting from that escape the review filter? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Some businesses may soon find that their ratings on Google have changed for better or for worse. They’re doing away with old anonymous Zagat reviews – the ones where the person’s name is “A Zagat User.”
To show a consistent reviews experience to our users, reviews that are labeled by “A Zagat User” are being removed from Google products. Reviews from Google users will still appear as usual, and users can still contribute reviews. This may affect the overall rating for some businesses.
If your business has a lot of negative anonymous reviews from Zagat, this is probably good news. If it has a lot of positive ones, then perhaps not so much.
Either way, Google has been migrating away from anonymity in reviews for quite a while. When it migrated to the Google+ Local model for local search, it started requiring users to be signed into their Google accounts to leave reviews. Still, Google continued to show anonymous reviews that said “A Google User” for new reviews for sometime after that. It still displays these for older reviews.
We heard last month that Yahoo and Yelp were teaming up to add local business reviews to Yahoo’s local search results. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reportedly revealed the partnership in an employee meeting. These things never stay inside the company.
Anyhow, both companies have now announced the partnership and integration. When Yahoo users in the U.S. look up local businesses, they’ll see user reviews, business information, and star ratings from Yelp as well as photos from Yelp, other partners, and the businesses themselves.
“At Yahoo, we’re always looking to build great partnerships to provide a richer experience for our users,” says Anand Chandrasekaran, Senior Director, Product Management at Yahoo. “That’s why we’re especially fired up to add trusted user content from Yelp, bringing more business listings, more photos, and more reviews to the recently-refreshed Local Search and Yahoo Maps experiences. With information and photos for retail chains, mom and pop shops, spas, doctors and hospitals, restaurants, and more, Yelp is a welcome addition to our roster of local content partners.”
“With local searches making up about 25% of Yahoo’s search traffic, the demand for reliable local information is high, and we’re excited to make this experience even richer for Yahoo users,” says Mike Ghaffary, Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at Yelp. “Across all categories of local business, from dog groomers and day spas to nightclubs and burger joints, trusted content from Yelp’s vibrant community of locals will help Yahoo users decide where to spend their money.”
Both companies consider Yelp reviews to be “trusted,” and perhaps they are by many, but it has become clear that there are also quite a few businesses and consumers that don’t exactly trust what they read on the site. This week, we reported on none other than Andrew Zimmern blasting the site and its reviews. We also hear from businesses all the time (see the comments sections of most of our Yelp articles) that they don’t care for Yelp, often saying it hurts them more than helps them. Yelp itself, also continues to deal with the never-ending problem of fake reviews.
Yelp is taking some harsh criticism in the media once again. Its handling of fake reviews is coming under fire, as is its worth to consumers. Business owners are speaking out (as usual), and celebrity chef/TV personality/food writer Andrew Zimmern, who has been critical of Yelp in the past, is calling it “worthless”.
Yelp recently announced that it had handed out a new round of consumer alerts – warnings that appear on business pages – calling out businesses for alleged foul Yelp review play. It also renewed alerts on some businesses that had previously received them.
“We normally remove alerts after 90 days, but we won’t hesitate to renew them if we continue to see suspicious activity,” said Yelp’s Kristen Whisenand on the company blog. “That’s exactly what happened for two businesses this time around. We again found something amiss with two of the locations for Chicago-based nail salon, Azure Nails. And someone was caught red-handed yet again trying to buy reviews for Evergreen.”
Chicago’s ABC 7 spoke with Azure’s owner Hoang Bui as well as with a Yelp spokesperson, who said Yelp found a “large number of positive reviews” coming from the same IP address, which it considered “a sign of someone trying to game the system and mislead consumers”. The news outlet reports:
When asked if he or his employees were writing reviews, Bui said “No. We have Wi-Fi here, and I asked my clients to write reviews right here in my business, and my clients use Wi-Fi here.”
But Yelp says it has additional evidence, including a negative review of a rival salon, from that same IP address.
Bui has his own allegations. He said he believes Yelp has made negative reviews more visible because he refused to pay for advertising.
In fact, the subject came up yet again in a report last week from WTOC in Savannah.
Cathi Denham, the owner of doggie day care and luxury pet hotel Catnip n Biscuits said, “Customers leave reviews when they’re mad at us for something we wouldn’t do their way, and they’re negative reviews. We have some really good reviews on Yelp also, but you’ll never see those because they’re hidden in the filter button to filter out the good ones. It’s just wrong….it will say Yelp doesn’t recommend these reviews, but that’s where all our good reviews are. There’s no good reviews on the front page.”
She said that her rating dropped, and that is when Yelp began soliciting her to advertise.
“They don’t say it, but I know people that do advertise with Yelp that their negative reviews then disappear, and only the positive reviews show up,” she said.
Yeah, we’ve heard this story over and over again. Yelp denies that this happens, and calls such accusations “conspiracy theories” and the result of the Woozle effect. Yet the accusations keep coming from business owner after business owner.
Zimmern didn’t really get into any of that specifically, but says he finds Yelp and products like it to be “increasingly worthless” as a consumer. He was critical of Yelp’s ability to maintain legitimate content.
He told Eater, “Do I think that there’s some sort of satanic conspiracy going on over there or some covert plan to compensate people? No, I don’t. Do I think that there are some people who have taken a rogue position and easily tried to stretch boundaries and stuff? Yes, I do. That’s what happens with organizations that are horizontal and not vertical. In today’s world, especially the digital world, especially with a product like Yelp, the organization is horizontal and not vertical. There are always people trying to take advantage of stuff like this, so I imagine, sure, I don’t think Yelp can do a lot about how people interact with this forum.”
“It is their responsibility, and policing it is just a hard job,” he added. “That’s why I’m not giving them a pass. They’re probably scrambling to figure this shit out as much as anyone. I will tell you flat out that I continually find Yelp and products like it to be increasingly worthless to me as a consumer. That’s really where I feel strongest about it.”
He said later in the interview, “The last thing I want to do is utilize a service where millions of people are chiming in, and the results are tainted. Either it’s people who don’t know what they’re talking about shouting over the people who do … Look. There’s lots of people on Yelp whose opinions I would love to have, but you know what, I can’t use on Yelp, because Yelp to me is worthless.”
On Yelp’s effects on businesses, he told Eater, “Yelp, in a very perverse way, I may not like them or recommend them, but they have hit a core amongst viewers and they can move the needle. A good review in the New York Times used to be worth two million dollars. A good review on Yelp, they’ve put some sort of number attached to that. God bless them. It helps them sell ads, I’m sure. I think it’s a defective mechanism. It’s very, very popular. There’s tens of millions of people on that site.”
Either way, Yelp is encouraging people to leave a lot more reviews, and to say more in the reviews they do leave.
Fast Company interviewed Yelp Consumer and Mobile Products Vice President Eric Singley, who said the company has “always emphasized quality over quantity.”
But at the end of the year, Yelp sang the praises of its user who had written the most reviews during 2013. He wrote 1,712, which is roughly five a day. At that point, he had written about 7,000 of the site’s 47 million reviews.
Last year, Yelp finally made it so that users of its mobile apps can leave reviews, which has greatly contributed to quantity. Yelp released its Q4 and full year 2013 financials last month, and revealed that during the quarter, it had approximately 53 million mobile unique visitors and 30% of new reviews were contributed through mobile devices.
Yelp is actively encouraging higher quality with these reviews, however. Or at least higher word count. Singley pointed out to Fast Company for those who try to leave really short reviews, the app tells them, “This review is shorter than most.” They consider this “a nudge in the right direction.”
Do you think Yelp is doing a good job of maintaining quality content throughout its site? Are businesses being treated fairly? Is the Yelp experience valuable to consumers? Tell us what you think.
Google has run into some “complications” upgrading local businesses to the new Places dashboard.
In some cases, businesses’ accounts and another accounts that they don’t control were both verified for the same business using the old Places dashboard. In other cases, the businesses may have verified multiple times from the accounts they do control. Either way, it has resulted in duplicates.
Google has been sending out emails to affected businesses, which say:
We’d like to inform you that Google Places no longer accommodates more than one authorized owner per business location. Your account contains one or more listings that have been identified as duplicates of other listings and as a result, some of the information you provide will not be shown to Google users anymore…
By logging into your Google Places for Business dashboard, you can view the duplicate listing, which will show a banner reading, “You cannot update this listing because it has been marked as a duplicate of another.” If you no longer want to manage this listing, you can remove this listing from your dashboard. Alternatively, you can request administrative access from the current owner of the listing using the link to Learn more in your dashboard.
It’s possible that someone else in your organization, or a third party whom you once worked with, verified the business in another account. If you don’t believe anyone else could possibly be active in managing this business information, other than yourself, you can always contact support directly to help restore your account’s access to the listing.
She then talks about three scenarios: Multiple known verified accounts from old Places dashboard; Verified same business in both Google Places and in Google+, same account; and Verified same business in both Google Places and in Google+, different accounts.
In any of these situations, you can keep the duplicate listing instead of the active one if you wish.
If any of this affects you, definitely read Wang’s whole post.
Google announced that it has made some tweaks to the Google Places Quality Guidelines, specifically for business names. The changes illustrate how you can add descriptors.
Jade Wang announced the update ion a post on the Google Product Forums. Under “Business Name,” it now says:
Your title should reflect your business’s real-world title.
In addition to your business’s real-world title, you may include a single descriptor that helps customers locate your business or understand what your business offers.
Marketing taglines, phone numbers, store codes, or URLs are not valid descriptors.
Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors (in italics for demonstration purposes) are “Starbucks Downtown” or “Joe’s Pizza Restaurant”. Examples that would not be accepted would be “#1 Seattle Plumbing”, “Joe’s Pizza Best Delivery”, or “Joe’s Pizza Restaurant Dallas”.
Late last month, Google announced that it was adding 1,000 new categories in the new Places dashboard for businesses. This is an effort to significantly expand the breadth of available categories internationally.
The announcement was made in the Google product forums, and on Friday, that announcement received an update from Google’s Jade Wang, who had some additional news to share:
Additionally, we’ve just launched support for regional dialects in business categories on both Places for Business and Google Maps! As an example, an English speaking business owner in India can now choose the commonly used term Petrol Pump as their business category instead of the term Gas Station, which is uncommon in India. This new feature improves localization of business categories for more than a dozen countries.
Unfortunately, Wang did not specify which countries are getting these new options, but if you’ve had to select on oddly-worded version of your own category, you might want to check back in with the dashboard, and see if they’ve added something more appropriate.
Yelp announced that it is rolling out a new site design along with a new look for business pages. Rather than making a few teaks, the’ve elected to take the “from the ground up” approach.
The new design plays up local content contributed by Yelp users, while also making it easier to find business info.
“Since photos are used to determine an incredible amount about a business, the new design puts them front and center,” says product manager Brad Menezes. “Instead of a small thumbnail, we’re featuring up to six big, beautiful photos of the business. Now a quick glance at a restaurant’s page can give you a feel for the dining experience, food quality and ambiance, all within mere seconds.”
This follows changes Yelp made last year to match users’ photos with their reviews.
“Yelp’s review highlights give you a birds-eye-view of our community’s favorite elements of a business,” says Menezes. “Because review highlights are so useful, we’ve given them a huge upgrade, mining our review data to call out the best menu items, prices and important information like whether a bar is beer and wine only. Looks like we should head to Tataki South during happy hour, try the Garlic Edamame to start and order the one-of-a-kind Extinguisher Roll (yum!).”
They’ve also adjusted the column width and font size to make it easier to read reviews, while adding large photos in-line.
In other Yelp news, the company has partnered with Yahoo to integrate its reviews and listings into Yahoo local search results.
