What is Review Gating and Why Should I Stop?

Review gating is the act of soliciting feedback from a customer, and then deciding whether to ask them for a Google (Yelp, Or other Review Site) review based on their response. Simply means filtering which reviews are published onto a GMB, Yelp or other Review site business listing. Companies do this by sending customers a survey about their recent experience. Customers who respond positively are prompted to leave a Google (or other review site) review, while those who respond negatively are instead asked to provide private feedback. In this way businesses are able to stream positive reviews straight to the public while handling unhappy customers behind the scenes, resulting in an inflated GMB, Yelp or other listing’s rating. This is strictly against Google My Business’ review guidelines and comes with heavy penalties.  The end result is a deceivingly positive rating for the business that may not be representative of actual customer opinion.

It’s as simple as that. If you want to get reviews on Google, you have to ask everyone for a review, rather than cherry-picking the customers you think might give you the best reviews. By manipulating the review process, they actually undermine the very value reviews hold: trust.

In April 2018, Google updated its review guidelines for businesses that collect reviews from their customers. Among the new changes was the banning of a practice known as “review gating”. Both Google and Summit Marketing (and its affiliates) are against review gating.

As Google states alongside its Prohibited Content policy: Don’t discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.

 

There are multiple ways businesses can ‘gate’ reviews. Here are a few examples:

  • Using software to preface each review request with a sentiment question. Were you satisfied with your experience? Yes/No”, then only sending those who say “Yes” to review sites to share feedback.
  • Selectively routing survey respondents to review sites based on their responses. Most survey companies allow businesses to set up “skip and display” logic, sending unhappy customers to different questions than happy customers. Using this, businesses can get away with only asking happy customers for reviews.
  • Asking only those customers to leave a review who you think will leave positive feedback face-to-face, and refraining from asking unsatisfied customers for feedback.
  • Offering incentives for positive reviews. This results in biased positive feedback that does not actually reflect real customer experiences.

Why is Google against gating reviews?

Google’s mission is to provide users with relevant, trustworthy information. Customer’s Google reviews are at the core of the trust Google strives to foster. These reviews describe authentic experiences from unbiased sources. Reviews help consumers find the best local businesses; reviews and ratings impact how local businesses rank in Google search results. By not allowing review gating, Google intends to keep the integrity and power of reviews intact.

If you are a business, why is review gating a bad idea?

Here are three reasons why you should avoid review gating.

You will lose the trust of your customers and prospective customers.

 Your customers will only trust your reviews if it’s clear they are authentic and represent an unbiased view of your business. Gating reviews defeats that purpose by leading to disproportionately positive reviews that customers view as less credible, especially when their experience doesn’t match what they read about.

Companies like Google are unlikely to publish your reviews if you use gating. 

If you gate your reviews, Google can likely detect this. They may remove your reviews, and/or penalize your business in search rankings. Although this sounds hard to enforce, you’d be surprised at how effective Google has been in finding and punishing this kind of suspicious activity on Google My Business accounts.

Contrary to popular belief, review gating does not really help you get ahead.

We observed that businesses not using review gating actually increased their review count, without any meaningful impact to their ratings. More data backing this up later in this article.

Your best course of action is to build trust with your customers by collecting reviews for all customer interactions. Understanding all points of view about your business can help you improve aspects of your operations that you maybe hadn’t even thought of before. Besides, negative reviews aren’t a bad thing . They actually help prove to prospective customers that your reviews represent real experiences, making them trust the positive ones even more. Most successful businesses use a tools like myLocalReputationMarketing.com that automates their end-to-end review process while following industry best practices.

What Are the Risks of Review Gating?

Before we get into the risks, though, here’s the opportunity: if you only ask for reviews from happy customers, how can you showcase your exceptional customer service by responding to negative reviews online?

Think about this: only 11% of consumers (According to a survey done by BrightLocal) don’t read responses left by the business when checking out a business online. That’s a heck of a lot of opportunities to show the world what you’re really like on your Google My Business profile, which, lets face it, can otherwise be fairly generic and brand-agnostic. This is just one of the potential positives of negative reviews.

And now, the risks: here’s what Google can to do your business (or any business you’re managing) if it discovers you’re review gating.

It can remove all reviews left on your Google My Business profile.

No, not just the ones left since you were discovered actively review gating or using a platform that allowed it…

It can remove all of your Google reviews, going back to the beginning of time.

Review gating to get only positive reviews doesn’t seem so appealing now, does it?!

Today’s consumers love to review everything

We now live in a world where everything gets a review. What used to be the domain of movies, restaurants, music, and art, and flowed from the pens of critics, is now firmly in the grip of the smartphone-wielding consumer.

And today’s consumers love to review everything, from hotels and gyms to doctors and lawyers. So much so that there’s a review site for pretty much every industry out there! With the prevalence of consumer reviews and review sites today, it’s little wonder then that they can have such a profound effect on local businesses.

Studies show, for example, that more than half of consumers will only use a business if it has an average star rating of ⅘ or more (study by Brightlocal). Combine that with increasing competition in the online review space, and you’ve got a situation in which every business is clamoring for more and better reviews.

This rush for more reviews puts the owners of these review sites in a tricky position. More reviews means more trustworthy results, right? Well, wrong.

That’s because in response to the surge in review spam, the larger review sites that bear the brunt of the problem (like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and TripAdvisor) have published and enforce strict review site guidelines declaring what tactics businesses are restricted from using on their sites.

What should business owners do?

If you are using a review-soliciting platform that does this, you need to turn the gating function off ASAP.  Luckily, we use a company (Summit Marketing Subsidiary) that is super-connected with Google My Business and had already been working on removing this as a feature because they had a feeling it was something Google didn’t like. myLocalReputationMarketing.com currently offers a few different ways to collect reviews and although most of them were already in compliance with this rule, a couple were not. Their tool is already updated so that it no longer offers this as an option.

So, What’s the Right Way for Local Businesses to Request a Review on Google?

It’s really quite simple: ask every customer for their feedback, then ask every customer who provides it for a review.

If you do this, be it in person, via email, SMS or even using business cards and in-store signage you can be sure you’re not violating Google’s terms and conditions for Google My Business.

Send a review request email or SMS to all your customers.

Right after a customer visits a local business or has been provided a service, they receive a review request email or text. The customer has the option to write a review on a third-party site (with links provided by the business). All these options are provided to all customers, regardless of their sentiment (positive or negative).

Data shows removing “review gating” does not hurt your scores and will grow your overall volume

Data by GatherUp shows that review gating yields almost no benefits to the business and getting rid of it can significantly boost review counts. After an internal study of roughly 10,000 locations found that “gating” had very little impact on the average star-rating but that NOT gating saw a significant increase in review volumes. Nearly a 70% volume increase.

More reviews are better.

A 2019 study from Womply found that review volume was strongly correlated with small business revenue. Another recent study from Uberall found that conversions actually suffered for businesses with 5-star ratings compared with those that had lower but still positive review scores. This is because “perfect scores” are viewed with more skepticism by consumers and suggestive of fraud.

Face negative reviews head on.

Don’t let a negative review bring you down. 78% of consumers feel if a business responds to a review, it shows they care. Respond to negative reviews and offer a solution. Don’t have a solution for the problem yet? Let your customers know you hear them and you’re working on a way to solve their problem. When you respond to a review, 33% of customers will update the review to something positive (according to Chatmeter) and 34% (according to Chatmeter) will delete their negative review.

Negative reviews can be a good thing.

Stop worrying about getting a few negative reviews. If reviews look “too good to be true”… they probably are. A study by Spiegel Research Center found that purchase likelihood is greater in the 4.0 – 4.7 rating range and decreases as the ratings get closer to 5.0. Even if you get away with it, review gating can still cause damage to your bottom line.

 

We hope that answers the question ‘what is review gating and should a business do it? ’ for you and goes some way to encouraging you to get started with your own review generation campaigns, free from worry. If you would like us to help you put a review generation and marketing campaign in place contact us and we would be glad to help!

How To Build A Good Online Marketing Strategy

In today’s market economy, companies must have a good online marketing strategy. With the new technology developments quite a number of companies are going online for their marketing needs. This is due to the fact that the internet is an inexpensive way of doing business especially in advertising and marketing. Do you know why the majority of businesses’ marketing efforts fail? The answer is simple; they don’t have a good online marketing strategy.

When you work online, in everything you do, you need to have a marketing strategy that is outlined and able to be duplicated easily and consistently. The last thing that any company wants is to spend time, money and effort, only to find in the end that it does not work. Even worse is that they don’t even know “why” it didn’t work.

It is very important that you know how things work, why it works and when it is going to work. A lot of people try the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube as part of their marketing strategies. They also try other strategies like blog posting and article marketing for the purpose of getting more traffic. But none of these work without the total online marketing strategy in place.  One piece of the puzzle does not give you what you need to complete it.

In order to be successful with these types of social media marketing efforts, you need to have a really good marketing strategy that will help you understand how and why your marketing works.

Below are tips that you need to do in order to be able to build an effective online marketing strategy.

TIPS ON CREATING AN ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGY

Tip 1
Create/Identify your message

It’s important that your strategy marketing template has a really good keyword in it so that you can be found by your target market when they search for your product or service or problem that you have a “resolution” to.

Tip 2
Pick/Choose your media

You can do reputation marketing, local search marketing, video marketing, article marketing, RSS feeds or bookmark strategies, and even Pod Casting. Just start with one that you are comfortable with and don’t move on to the others until you can develop a good marketing strategy that works for you and your market.

Tip 3
Get your message out to the market place

You can start by syndicating your content through out the social media sites.

Tip 4
Track your message/ traffic

When you create a video, upload them at YouTube, Viddler and all kinds of different video sites. Make sure you track the traffic to see if the strategy is actually working. This is one of the best ways to build an online marketing strategy. If using local search marketing then Google Analytic is another great tracking tool.

For more information about strategies that will help you develop the best online marketing strategy call us at 888.557.1258.  And if you want a FREE report to find out where you rank in Google Maps compared to your competition go to: Online Marketing Strategy www.MyLocalSearchRankingReport.com

Online Marketing Videos Improve Conversions

How Online Marketing Videos Improve Conversions

Still not convinced that you need and Video production company and an online video marketing company  as part of your marketing campaign?  Rather then just tell you how great video marketing is we are going to show you some stats that will open your eyes on just how important and vital online marketing video is to the success of your business.

Who Is Watching Online Videos?

Both Accenture and Search Engine Journal, 85% of internet users in the US view online videos on a regular basis. In March 2011 alone the US viewed 5.7 billion videos online, which included 4.3 billion online video advertisements (Comscore, March 2011 Online Video Rankings).

That is a massive amount of people watching a ton of videos, including advertisements.  And while most of us tend to skip right past annoying ads on the TV with new technology devices such as our DVR sets, viewers tend to be much more receptive to online ads.  One obvious reason is that online ads don’t last long, most are under a minute while TV ads can be 3+ minutes.  At most, an online ad is a short 15-45 second blurb that is thrown in between different online videos.

Videos Can Help Conversion Rates

So we have billions of people watching videos and ads online every day. That is great but what makes it even better is that videos have been proven to increase conversion rates exponentially for a number of companies in a number of different niches worldwide.

In January 2009 the online retailer Shoeline decided to add videos to help showcase their products, and are they glad they did!  Adding videos had them seeing a 44% increase in online sales conversions (Internet Retailer, January 2009). Zappos reported similar numbers where they were seeing anywhere from 6% to 30% in their sales for products that had a video accompaniment (ReelSEO, December 2009).

This conversion increase shouldn’t come as a surprise. Having a video on a website has proven to increase one’s time visiting on the website. Internet Retailer reported that videos not only boosted conversion rates for the online retail site Living Direct, it increased the time spent on the site by 9%.

Going Mobile & Online Marketing

So what does that mean? Marketing firms and businesses should not forget about the mobile users.

Smart phone users prefer? That’s right, Video. Why? Because it’s faster to gather information and it’s seen as a more trustworthy source than text on a page. But here’s why smartphone users are important to you:

  • By 2014, there will be more internet users than laptop and desktop users (Microsoft Tag Mobile Marketing Report, 2011)
  • 50% of all local searches are done on mobile devices (Microsoft Tag Mobile Marketing Report, 2011)
  • 46% of shoppers who are using mobile devices in stores are using them to compare a competitor’s website (Forsee Results, 2010)
  • A recent Demandware survey revealed that 83% of smartphone users all considered their phones to be more valuable than any other in-store technology for shopping, and only 16% of shoppers believed that the sales associate was the best source of information. 43% of consumers will place more trust in a sale in their mobile device than any other device OR sales associate (Point of Sale News, May 2011)
  • 77% of mobile video viewers are watching more video than they did a year ago (eMarketer 2010)

The bottom line: everyone is going mobile and mobile users are savvy shoppers.  Videos will help sell your products and services and build trust and confidence that a mobile user needs in order to purchase from you rather then your competitor.  If you don’t have a video marketing campaign, then I hope you see it is time to change and start implementing one today.

Key Takeaways

When you stop and think about video marketing and what it does, none of the stats just mentioned should be a huge surprise.  In the faceless and anonymous world of the internet, having a video allows something that once was intangible to be more tangible.

You can see what it is you are thinking about buying or using.  You can see what it does, how it performs, what it looks like, how others have experienced it.  Videos allow your potential clients to visualize themselves using your product or service and it helps them trust more o they feel more compelled to make a purchase.  And with any luck, your video could go viral which will bring in even more traffic than you could ever imagine.

Need Help With Video Marketing?

If video marketing is something you are interested in but are having trouble getting started contact us today at 888.557.1258.

Get your FREE Local Reputation Report www.MyLocalReputationReport.com and find out what your customers are saying about you online.