It’s a great concept, really. In case you didn’t know, you have 10 “Best Ever” medals to award to your most beloved places, from your favorite coffee shop to your cable company. You may be able to go around handing out 5 star reviews to hundreds of businesses, but not so with medals. However, if you find a new place you love even more than the last, don’t worry—you can remove and reassign your medals. If your business receives—and keeps—a “Best Ever” medal, consider it an achievement.

If you’ve made it a point to follow all of Google’s frequent product updates, you might already be using medal ratings, or you at least know where to find them. Most of you who are familiar with Google Places probably recognize the reviews section. When you visit a business’s Google Places listing, you can leave a review if you’re signed into your Google account and have created a Google Places profile for leaving ratings. You can leave star ratings from 1-5 and you can also include longer reviews if you feel like it.

But you can’t leave a “Best Ever” review from the main listing page (or on your iPhone app). You also can’t leave “Best Ever” reviews by clicking on Google Places in your list of products, because it takes you here:

Because you are trying to leave ratings, not create your own business listing, the best way to access the Google Places dashboard where you can leave “Best Ever” reviews is by going directly to http://www.google.com/places/.  I mean, I could go into using the now technically defunct Google Hotpot, but to keep it simple, just take my advice and memorize the Google Places URL. Or bookmark it.

You should see this screen after going to the main Places URL. Click on the blue “Start rating” button on the left.

After you hit the blue button, you should see this screen. Once you’re here, you can finally start awarding those coveted “Best Ever” medals.

So, the next time you’re getting ready to leave yet another 5 star review for a place that you feel actually deserves a little bit more, remember the medals. And businesses, take note…it’s not quite as easy for someone to leave a “Best Ever” rating, and to make the top 10, services and products should be great, not just good.

Kristen Watson

Kristen Watson is a Search Marketing Associate at Direct Online Marketing.

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What Is Retargeting?

Before we get into some of the neat ways people are using retargeting for extended reach and conversion, let’s start with the basics.  Skip to the next headline if you’re already familiar.

I like to refer to retargeting as a second bite of the apple.  Some other people call it ‘cyberstalking,’ while still others call it ‘creepy.’  Some online marketers just call it “effective.”  Here’s how traditional retargeting works:

Friendly Visitor (or FV as she will now be known) visits your site.  FV has a cookie uploaded to their browser.  FV leaves your site.  As FV goes along her merry way, she visits other Web sites who sell remnant ad space through a third party network.  Utilizing this third party network for retargeting, your ads continue to follow FV across a variety of Web sites.  You have control over a variety of factors.  Depending on who you’re using for retargeting, these include:

• Bid
• Bid type (CPC, CPM, CPA)
• Ad type (image, text, video, dynamic) and variation
• Length of time the cookie remains on the browser, assuming FV doesn’t wipe it clean.  Varies from instantly up to 30 days.
• Different messaging based on what page was visited
• Different messaging depending on whether the person has converted or not
• Which sites and types of sites are eligible to show your ad (brand protection).

How Well Does Retargeting Work?

Like with all forms of internet marketing – and really, life – your mileage may vary.  But all things being equal, advertisers typically see a ton of ad impressions at a very low cost.  Often times we see that they pick up a number of conversions at a good conversion rate and low cost per conversion, though the scale often isn’t there unless the site has huge traffic volume.

Retargeting or Remarketing: What’s the Difference?

One of the platforms offering retargeting, Google AdWords refers to it as remarketing?  Why?  I have no idea – ask whoever is in charge of their branding.  There’s no difference.  It’s kind of like if Pittsburgh were a company that produced rubber bands and they called them ‘gum bands’ while the rest of the world just kept calling them rubber bands.   But, what is really nice is the ability to run retargeting campaigns directly out of your paid search account with Google.

Creative Uses of Retargeting

With the basics out of the way, let’s talk about some interesting ways retargeting is being used today:

• Rectifying shopping cart abandonment. Lose people during the shopping cart process?  Target just the people that added items to their cart (or made it to a specific page), but didn’t complete their order.  Offer them a coupon or free shipping or however you want to entice them to finish their purchase.
• Saving the lead. Similar to shopping cart abandonment, but for lead gen.  Encourage persons who made it to one of your offer pages, but didn’t sign up.  Just be aware that the person may have chosen to give you a call instead of filling out a form.
• New ad offering for publishers. One of our truck dealer clients forwarded us an email from a publisher in their industry offering their own retargeting.  Randall Reilly is offering their advertisers and truck dealers whom they’d like to become clients a pretty cool deal.  They will serve up an advertiser’s ads to people who have visited their site.  I don’t know any specifics so I can’t endorse it, but love the idea.  Kudos to Randall Reilly!
• Search retargeting. Here’s a really fun one.  As mentioned above, traditional retargeting when someone has visited your site.  How else would they get the cookie on there?  If you have a strong click through rate, maybe you’ve captured 5% of the people who have searched. The other 95% is lost forever – or are they?Well, some enterprising platforms have come up with a solution and allow you to retarget people who have searched for a particular term, but not visited your site.  I’m pretty sure it’s done with magic cookies – which one would assume are different from magic brownies – but the possibilities are endless here.  We especially love retargeting folks who have searched for your competitors.The three search retargeting industry leaders  – Chango, Magnetic, and Simpli.fi – offer key differences from one another.  Their minimums range from $5k to $30k per month.  As of right now, Simpli.fi is the only one offering a self-service platform, although Magnetic has one in beta that is supposed to launch Q1 2012.
• (Update) Cross Channel.  Standard retargeting is not limited to just your Web site.  You can drop cookies anywhere where people are using the internet to reach you, including email and social media properties like facebook.  Hat tip to Caroline at Retargeter, a self-service retargeting platform, who mentioned these in the comments.

Update 2: Chango reached out to provide a nice graphic called the 7 Types of Retargeting. You can click on that link to download, or read more from their blog post on the same subject.

Hope this recap is helpful.  As with most of the topics about which we blog, if you want a firm to handle your retargeting efforts, let us know – we’d love to help!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Actually, I meant Pittsburgh Pirates, but we do celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day around these seas.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile or have spoken to me ever, you probably know one thing about me: I’m obsessed (cursed?) with the Pirates.

If you know a second thing, it’s how strongly I feel all businesses need to understand how their online reputation can either help them get more business or have money snatched out of their tills.

Last week we updated you on a sea change for how Google now handles outside reviews.  Namely: it no longer lists them on the Places pages themselves.  Google said it’s because of recent feedback; others say it’s to deal with long-standing complaints from review sites like Yelp; others are speculating it’s due to a recent FTC probe into their business practices (including specifically about how it handles 3rd party reviews in Places).

Likely it’s a combination of all three and other reasons.  Ironically about the FTC probe, if Google’s successful with building the community of artists formerly known as Hotpot and continuing to grow reviews, I think they’ll gain a bigger monopoly than if it continued to show reviews from sites like TripAdvisor.

Any way, Google’s stance is that it has taken down third party reviews from Places Pages, which it has done.  You won’t see ratings or reviews on individual Places Pages.

However – outside third party reviews are still appearing in some snippets for Places listings within Maps results.  Here’s one example of what is clearly identified as an InsiderPages review:

It appears (I’ve done a little digging, but wouldn’t call the research exhaustive by any stretch) that this is happening when Google Places previously displayed a review from an outside source and there are no current Google account reviews.

I can see how that would happen from a technical standpoint, but just think it’s kind of weird – or an oversight – that you’re seeing that information in the snippets.

As a business owner, you need to be aware these 3rd party reviews could still be haunting or helping you in this way.  However, you’ve already been focusing on increasing reviews on Google Places, so it shouldn’t be affecting you, right?

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

It’s personalized results, yknow. Just have a look at the following video if you’re a bit bemused by what I’m talking about:

It’s one of those things that still confuses certain elements as they’re not always aware of the changes in their own personal search results and are deliriously happy that their own site ranks in the top three for gold bars or something.

But, I get Google’s thinking – if it means something to you personally then it makes more sense for it to display more prominently for you than for everybody.

After all, one man’s #1 SERP is another man’s spam.

But, we’re interested to find out what the general feeling is about personalized searches since they’ve been in operation for a while.

Do you prefer them? Did you know they existed? Do you even have a Google account?

Or are you happy you’ve finally been able to work out why your search results pop around all over the place dependent on which computer you’re on?

Answers in the comments please.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

There’s only one thing worse than you thinking your kid is super special, and that’s somebody else vicariously thinking the same and you liking it on facebook.

As much as Simon Cowell must be stopped in his pursuit of destroying music, his ability to destroy a parent/child axis of delusion without flinching is worthy of a knighthood.

Or, maybe that’s the botox.

Only one other group fails the critical faculty test as regularly as parents (sports fans don’t count as they know their team is crap but love them anyway) and that’s an entrepreneur.

One only has to watch Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank to appreciate that.

There’s nothing like the Simon Cowell of search engines – Google – to raise the hackles of the online entrepreneur when they feel they’ve been wronged.

Take the case of ShopCity – a local shopping/business portal that serves thousands of locations across the US.

They’re in the process of “publicly challenging the fairness of the search giant.” I’ve no idea whether this means they’d like to take Google to court or are drumming up a bit of publicity for their recently banished sites.

ShopCity, the parent company of local sites such as ShopPaloAlto.com, ShopMountainView.com and ShopPleasanton.com, says Google provides it an unfairly low ranking, especially since those sites have the backing of groups such as the city of Menlo Park, the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly newspaper. A search for “Palo Alto restaurants” on Google this week didn’t reveal a ShopPaloAlto.com result until the seventh page of results, while the site ranks at the top for identical searches on Yahoo or Microsoft’s Bing.

[…] ShopCity also says Google is taking its content and displaying it in Google Places, which like ShopCity displays business information such as location, operating hours and customer reviews. The practice is called “scraping,” and companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor.com also have complained about the practice.

Google spits back:

Google says its low ranking of ShopCity sites is fair because the vast majority of its more than 8,100 local sites across the U.S. and Canada do not feature original content. ShopCity acknowledges that all but 44 of its sites do not yet have original content, and the company says it has asked the search giant not to crawl and rank those sites. But Google says it must consider the collective authority of the company’s Internet properties, just as someone wouldn’t judge a supermarket tabloid as superior to a national daily newspaper based on the accuracy of one story.

“We’re committed to returning high-quality sites to our users,” said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman. “In the case of ShopCity, this is a network of thousands of sites that appear lower in Google’s rankings because nearly 100 percent of the sites violate our quality guidelines. For years, these sites have contained little original content, substantial duplicate content, along with cookie-cutter templates. Our users frequently complain to us about these kinds of sites.”

I have quite a bit of sympathy with site owners who have followed Google guidelines over the years only for them to shift the goal posts when they make an update. But, if you’re running an online business that piggybacks on Google rankings then you’re in for a whole heap of pain should those rankings ever evaporate.

Personally, I’d be asking if all those keyword domains that are now a reduced ranking factor with cross-linking from the cookie cutter areas of the template and no original content were/are factors.

Then, I’d ask you one SEO question: Have you ever seen Simon Cowell change his mind?

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

I logged out of everything and still got the same result.  Then I made sure safe search was on (it wasn’t – this should be the default in my opinion, but whatever).  Ran the result again, same result.

Here it is with Justin Less Offensive Search™ blurring:

And, yes, I’ll keep ranting and posting these examples as I find them.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Of course we were going to pull this pic. We've only seen this ad 13,440 times. Yes, we counted.

If you weren’t paying attention last week you missed that Google Places has dropped 3rd party review ratings and stars from its pages.  That meant for many companies going from a dozen reviews to 0-1 or from hundreds to a handful.  Which makes this a big deal.

But what exactly does it mean for you and your Places Page?

Outside Reviews Still Matter

It appears – and only makes sense – that Google is still using reviews and ratings from sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Insider Pages, Citysearch, and dozens of others to determine how high your Places Page should rank for searches along with the other variables in their local algorithm.  Just because they pulled them off their pages, doesn’t mean that they no longer matter to how well you do in Google’s map results.

Third Party Reviews Still Easily Accessible from Google

Just because the reviews won’t appear on the page itself, Google will still link out to some of them.  Here’s one example:

So even if you don’t think that your clients and potential customers ever visit a particular review site, they can still get there very easily from your Google Places Page.

Update 1: Just as important – Google may show star ratings directly within its main Web results for other sites as well, such as Yelp.  Here’s one sample picked up today for Yahoo!  Funny to think of Yahoo! previously being their biggest competitor and now Yahoo! allowing users to sign in with Google accounts and Google showing star ratings from Yahoo! sites:

Update 2: 3rd party reviews are not removed from all things Google Places yet.

Getting Actual Google Reviews More Important Than Ever

Whenever speaking, I tell a story of a friend who moved to Mississippi and needed to buy a big-ticket appliance.  Based on a coworker’s recommendation, he decided where he was going to buy it.  Right before leaving his apartment to pick it up, he decided he’d better check his hours to make sure it was still open.  He did a branded search (meaning he looked them up by name) and saw a one-star rating.  So then he started reading reviews, reviews that were really awful.  So he took his key back out the door, sat down and started researching a new place to buy, in essence taking several hundred dollars out of the till from the original store.

Those star ratings are huge – look at this example:

Which local listings draw your eye?  Which ones are you likely to click to learn more about?

If you don’t have many reviews from Google users on your places page, you need to start getting them now.  As several dealers told Cars.com, it’s not just about preventing lost sales from negative reviews – it’s about gaining new leads and sales from showing off great reviews.

Have a Good, All-Encompassing Reputation Management Plan

A word of caution here: the temptation for many companies will be to just chase after Google reviews and stop worrying about other review sites like Judy’s Book, Kudzu, and various yellow pages sites.  While I agree that – depending on your particular situation – getting Google reviews up to snuff becomes your #1 priority short-term, nothing replaces having a strong online reputation management plan.  And that starts with providing great experiences to your customers and encouraging them to tell their stories.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Update: Google has emailed all or at least a healthy majority of its advertisers announcing the +1 button coming to ads, so looks like it’s ready to leave experimental land.  One line stood out in the form email: “The final landing page URL of your ads can also appear on the Google profile of any user who +1’s your ad.”  Guess that’s so they can argue there is some benefit.

Before I delve into +1 for AdWords, let me preface with two thoughts:

1. I don’t see +1 getting wide adoption, period.  The reason facebook like buttons became so prevalent is because they tie into an integral function on a social network where people have real social interaction.  People don’t have that same community with Google outside of geeks like us.  Therefore I’m guessing +1 dodo’s out like other Google forays into social like Wave and Buzz.*
2. I’m usually wrong in these predictions.

* If you’re thinking Buzz isn’t dead, you’re technically right, much like you would be if you said cassette tapes aren’t dead.  But they’re a shell of themselves.  I also allow that Google Buzz could make a major comeback if Google ever figures out social.  They’re making good in roads via local, so all hope isn’t lost.

The Basics of +1 for Google AdWords

For the time being, +1 is something you have to sign into your account to see and go to Google Experiments and opt in to the experiment.  It’s browser dependent and doesn’t work with certain ones like IE7.  You may also have to clear your cache if you’re seeing messages like “The experiment you’re trying to access is no longer available. Go to experiments overview.”

Once you get it working, you should see a grayed-out +1 logo next to search results – both paid and natural like this:

If you scroll over any listing or ad, then the +1 box motions in some color, which at the end looks like this:

Then, if you choose to plus one the ad or result, it’ll appear in dark colors with a notice reminding you you have +1′d the result / ad and allowing you to undo it.  If this is the first time you’ve done a plus-one, it will give you a pop up explaining what it means, how your name will appear next to it publicly, and if you’d like to continue.

If you’re wondering if you should opt-in or opt-out of +1, quit wondering.  You don’t have any choice.  Google’s just going to do it – and it might not be consistent.

They say not to worry and from a cost standpoint, you don’t have to – they’re not charging you for +1′s.  Also as of right now, it doesn’t affect your ad’s quality score (although it does affect natural rankings).  But who’s to say it won’t in the future?  I’d argue it’s ripe for gaming for both SEO and paid search, but certainly Google has a lot of engineers and resources at its disposal to check for these signals.

If you’d like more info, you can check out this Google AdWords post about +1.

Why +1 for AdWords is a Terrible Idea

My main beef with +1 for AdWords is that it becomes a popularity contest.  Google’s theory is that it will be used by people as a recommending tool.  But what’s more likely is that it will be judging ads themselves and not the advertiser or its products / services.

We all like to talk about and vote on what the best Superbowl commercials are each year.  How do most of us do it?  Which one was the funniest or most emotional without offending our sensibilities.  But do those ads move product?  Make you actually remember the brand or, heaven forbid, think about going online or to the store to purchase or learn more?  You might like that new Doritos ad, but hate the taste of their nacho cheesy goodness (how dare you!?!).

Put aside the potential for gaming the system, that’s what concerns me about the +1.  I’m not getting too worked up about it, because I don’t see it gaining too much traction, but if it does, color me very worried. Because if you need to be funny at the expense of selling to get better positions and cheaper clicks, doesn’t that defeat the whole point of advertising on AdWords?

If I were going to ask for anything, it would be the -1 button.  As much as I’d like an unlike button for facebook, the -1 would have even more value for ads.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

We'll get there - promise. Picture courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Let me start off by writing I’m not going to give you a simple “yes” or “no” answer to the title question because there isn’t one.  Instead, let’s take repair our chopper Zen-style and discuss what you need to know to make the decision.

The Basics of Advertising on Competitor Brand Terms

Just to make sure we’re on the same page here, let’s define what we’re talking about.  The concept is buying a competitor’s name and other branded keyword phrases (e.g. branded product  names, executive names) so that your ads will show up when someone searches for those terms.

The process works the same as bidding on any other search term.  You select the competitor term(s) you wish to bid on, set how much you’re willing to pay, and set up ads for that ad group. Voila, you can have your ad appear when someone searches for your competitors.  There’s no cost to you until and unless someone clicks on one of your ads.

The Search Engines Let You Buy Competitor Names?

Yes, although it wasn’t always that way.  You didn’t used to be able to do it with Yahoo! Search Marketing, for example.  And the search engines have changed their trademark advertising policies several times.

Since Google and Microsoft are the only major players left in the US, let’s look at their current trademark policies.

Google AdWords Trademark Policy

Google AdWords only blocks use of trademarked terms in the ad copy and does not prevent advertising on the keywords themselves*.  If you’ve filed a general trademark complaint with them (or a specific trademark complaint against one or more specific offenders), they can block and/or remove ads with the trademarked terms.

* There are currently 9 mostly Pacific region countries where Google will actually investigate and possibly block competitors from advertising on the trademarked keyword.  These are Australia, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Macau, New Zealand, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan.  Additionally there are slightly different rules for European Union and European Free Trade Association members.

Be aware that Google made changes awhile back to allow resellers and informational sites to use your trademarked term in their ad text in the US, UK, Canada & Ireland provided that the ads:

1. Use the term in a descriptive or generic way and are not referencing the trademark owner. Or,
2. Use the trademark in a “nominative manner” to refer to the trademark owner in one of the following 3 ways:

• Resale.  The landing page must sell or facilitate the sale of the trademarked item.
• Sale of components, etc. that are related to the trademarked term.
• Informational sites, which do not sell the product itself.

Read the full policy.

Microsoft adCenter Trademark Policy

Microsoft adCenter made a major change to the intellectual property guidelines in March.  The history is a little confusing to follow because they used to have a more restrictive policy, then switched to Yahoo! Search Marketing’s trademark policies when it took over their system as part of the Microsoft-Yahoo! Search Alliance, which consummated in 2010. This Yahoo! policy they carried over was extremely friendly to trademark owners as trademark terms were automatically disapproved for competitors in most cases.

Then in March of this year, they switched to a new policy much more in line with Google AdWords.  That is, they don’t get involved with keywords.  Like AdWords, they also will investigate your trademark complaints over use of trademarked terms in ad copy.  They will, however, allow trademark terms to appear in ad text in “fair use” cases such as:

• Use by resellers
• Informational Web sites like product review sites
• Ordinary “dictionary” use
• Comparative advertising, as long as a 3rd party backs up your claims

Read their full US policy.

Is It Legal?

Who’s to say what’s legal?  Oh, I guess courts can.  Well, so far, courts have pretty much backed Google on this one when companies have sued them over their competitors buying their names.  The most reasonable argument that the courts have considered is whether or not it creates confusion.  Since the search engines don’t allow you to (or at least have a policy in place to say you can’t) use the trademarked term in your ad*, then it shouldn’t be confusing, right?  Well, the courts have found that pretty compelling.  And if your competitor’s name or other branded term isn’t trademarked, then there’s no issue at all as far as the search engines are concerned.

* Be aware there are ways to get around this with keyword insertion and display urls.

So, since the courts have basically backed Google and because they have more attorneys than Romania*, companies mostly just sue each other now.  So how’s that working out?

* may not be true, but my money’s on Google.

Turns out, pretty good for the poachers.  Here’s a very recent decision:

A judge in Wisconsin appears to have given the greenlight to search marketers who want to use people’s names to trigger pay-per-click ads.

Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Charles F. Kahn, Jr. this week dismissed an invasion of privacy lawsuit by personal injury lawyers at the firm Habush Habush & Rottier against attorneys at the rival firm Cannon & Dunphy. The privacy claim stemmed from allegations that Cannon & Dunphy used the names Habush and Rottier to trigger search ads for its own firm.

The law firm’s claim was based on a Wisconsin state law allowing suits for invasion of privacy if their name is used for commercial purposes without their permission. If that use is “unreasonable,” a judge can issue an injunction banning it.

Kahn ruled that Cannon & Dunphy’s use of the rival attorneys’ names wasn’t unreasonable for several reasons, including that it wasn’t likely to confuse searchers. “Internet users, and consumers in general, have learned to be skeptical about the first impression they may receive from a web page or commercial advertisement,” he wrote.

By the way, if you’re really into this sort of thing, check out Eric Goldman’s Technology & Law blog.  It’s the single best source on the Web for following these types of lawsuits regarding search engine marketing.

Should I Bid on My Competitor’s Name?

From personal experience, I can tell you that advertisers have really strong gut reactions to this question.  Some find the thought offensive and would never do it.  Others think all’s fair in love and war.  And some straddle the fence – only doing it when it happens to them or for that one competitor they really, really can’t stand.

If you feel very strongly one way or the other, just go with that.  But, if you’re on the fence or haven’t made up your mind, here are a few things to consider:

Pros

• It can work.  A lot of times people are interested in that competitor for a specific reason that won’t help you at all: trying to get hired, a vendor looking up directions, etc.  But for the consumer doing research – or maybe a current, unsatisfied client looking up a phone number, the pay off could be handsome.
  

  Maybe not this handsome.

• It will jerk their chain.  Double edged sword here (see Cons), but after seeing your ad on their name, internally they may devote a lot of executive resources figuring out what can be done.  Plus, some people just really, really like ticking off their competitors.
• More competition should drive up their prices to bid on their name. While this means they’ll be spending more money they could be devoting elsewhere, their Quality Scores will likely be so much higher than yours, that the additional cost may not add up to much.  Unless they weren’t advertising on their name at all before and decided to start doing so because of your ads.

Cons

• Your time.  Your competitors may call you up and chew you out about this.  Trust me, I’ve seen this time-suck happen and had advertisers flip their feelings about bidding on competitor names 180 degrees.
• Money.  They may sue you or threaten to do so.  While you could just adhere to their cease-and-desist and potentially be done with it, most companies will at least consult their attorneys about this.  And if they don’t happen to be experts in search – and virtually none are, this can get really expensive.  (BTW, we have consulted with attorneys about this in the past.  If you’re an advertiser or lawyer needing help with this, give us a shout at 800.979.3177.  We can also advise on how to broker a fair peace accord without the courts).
• They may start advertising on your name, which could send up your costs somewhat and also decrease your click throughs.

What ends up happening sometimes is that – whether mediated expensively through attorneys or done from President to President – a truce is called.  The downside is that it needs to be brokered with each competitor as it can’t be done through the search engines (other than if there’s a legitimate trademark complaint to be filed).

Are My Competitors Advertising on My Name?

One final note – you may be interested to know if your competitors are advertising on your name.  The first place to start is just to do a search and see.  But there are some complications with that, such as:

• They can block your ip if they can figure it out.  If you have a dedicated, named ip, this would be extremely easy to do through their analytics.  You don’t want to do all the searches from home at night, do you?
• They may only show during certain times of the day – or days of the week – by design.  Or, because of how budgets get spread out if not on an ‘accelerated’ spend, Google and Microsoft will spread out the impressions.  That makes for a decent chance you simply won’t see their ad even if they’re trying to advertise at that time.
• Unless you’re both selling locally only, they may very well be showing their ads throughout the US (or world) everywhere except for your location.

For these reasons and others, if you are extremely concerned about monitoring competitor bidding on your name and other trademarked terms, you should look into outsourcing this issue.  Search engine marketing agencies should be able to handle this service whether or not they are running any paid search campaigns for you.

For example, we will create a custom reporting system for you to ensure we’re catching competitors bidding on your terms and alert you to what’s being done.  We can also evaluate the ads to see if a trademark violation has in fact occurred and, if so, file a complaint on your behalf to Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.  If you’d like to learn more, please give us a call at 800.979.3177.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

JS: One of the things I thought was interesting is that you have a partnership with Bazaarvoice, is that correct?

Nick: Yes.

JS: Have they had to scrub much so far in terms of profanity or some of those other things or have they not really had to remove many reviews so far?

Nick: The amount of reviews that they are scrubbing hasn’t changed much since we’ve launched. I looked today and I think we’re at about 14% that are being kicked back. I’m actually pretty happy with that because it shows that yes, we are finding things that we don’t want and are rejecting them but it’s not been overwhelmingly so.

JS: I would imagine, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes, are you kind of learning as you go along with seeing the kickbacks and changing your stance on things and modifying what you want to see and what you don’t want to see or are you like, ‘here are our guidelines and here’s what we’re sticking with?’

Nick: We’ve definitely been tweaking some things and I think one of the big things we’ve seen, and Bazaarvoice has been great – they do a lot of fantastic moderation, but one of the things that we’ve seen is that the dealer business is so different from a lot of other industries that we have found that we have to tweak some things over time, but more along the lines of really understanding that here is the type of experience that would lead me, as a car buyer, to leave a review.

So, I think one of the best examples that I’ve seen is that on most review sites, when you’re reviewing a product – a physical product – you don’t want to include that I got something that would indicate that I got X number of dollars off the deal because you’re reviewing the store or the deal. And what we’ve been seeing is we get a pretty substantial number of reviews that call out specific things like that. It’s one of those gray areas that we’re taking a look and trying to figure out what makes the most sense in our world because for the most part I say that we probably all know someone who has gone to a dealership and got a fantastic deal and they immediately came back and said, ‘oh my gosh, you should shop at this store because they gave me $400 off’ or whatever it was. We want to make sure that we encourage people to leave those types of reviews while also not setting a certain expectation that it’s always going to be done this exact way for every person who comes into that store.

JS: Ruins their leverage to be able to do those types of things. Do you have a breakdown of what percentage have been kicked out for being spam, you know some evil person in my industry automated that’s trying to build links vs completely flaming vs….

Nick: I don’t have anything that I can quote off the top of my head but I do know that I’ve looked pretty closely and I really haven’t seen very much spam at this point mostly it’s about specific content rather than the same review being posted over and over again by the same person …that type of stuff.

JS: Do you have stuff in place to kick stuff out for dealers trying to game the system, not for negative reviews, but trying to get people to leave good, fake astroturf?

Nick: Absolutely. It’s the first thing that brought up when we talk to site users or the dealers. And it goes both ways. It’s this fear that:

1. How do you make sure that a dealer is not leaving a lot of negative reviews, followed by ‘How do I make sure that the dealer down the road isn’t coming in each morning and telling his salespeople that they’re going to leave five glowing reviews today just to build up our volume.’ So there are a couple different things that we do and you’ll see this when you look at the screen shot [see below], we do ask whenever someone leaves a review, the last question that we ask is a check a box to certify that they’re not employed by a dealership. I realize that’s not going to catch everyone, but we do want to make sure that right off the bat that we are asking the question to make sure that people understand that if you are a dealer, leaving a review, we are going to pay very, very close attention to it and you really shouldn’t be using it for that.

JS: Because you have a little bit of a hammer that you could bring down on someone for doing that.

Nick: Exactly. It gives us the ability to come back and say, ‘you know what, you certify that you weren’t a dealership, but your IP address indicates that you are so we’re going to do something with this.’

The other thing that we do is we require that each and every review goes through a validation process by the person who wrote it before we even look at it. The example that I use, is that if I’m at work and I’m bored and I am going to go write 20 bogus reviews, I’m going to get 20 different emails, and I have to open up each and every one and validate it and say yes, indeed I did write this and I did mean to send it. So, as a first step if we get 20 reviews, we do take a look at where the reviews are coming from so we do have some threshold there that will kick-off something that says, ‘you know what this is a little suspicious or we just don’t want this at all.’

JS: I can understand why you might not want to disclose any of this information, but can you talk about anything that you have in place to guard against astroturfing or false-flaming or anything like that?

Nick: What I can talk about is pretty standard from what I’ve heard in the industry is to pay very, very close attention to the IP address of any dealership. I know some folks who go to the trouble of specifically collecting the IP address of every dealership and for other folks who just pay attention to once a response is written, capture the IP address and then sort-of flag that for any reviews that come later on. So, we do similar stuff there because we do want to make sure we are paying very, very close attention to. Once we feel like something is coming from a dealership, we don’t other different types of content coming from someone who may have a biased viewpoint there.

JS: Have you had any feedback…one of the things that … and almost everyone deals with this because anyone who has reviews, like you said, some kind of IP check…something along those lines, but one of those throwing the baby out with the bathwater type of issues, at least from my perspective, is that it’s really convenient if a dealer can just leave up a computer and have the new car buyer talk about their experience, right there in the moment.

Nick: It’s one of the hardest things in the world and it comes up so often and it’s such a great idea, you know ‘I’m in the store, I’m buying a car, I’m sitting there waiting for the financing to go through (or whatever it is)’, and they say, ‘why don’t you go ahead and leave a review for me while you’re here.’ We would love to be able to do it, it’s just that the number one concern, from both site users and dealers was that we’re filtering out those false-positives. We’ve suggested some things and I had one dealer come up to me at NADA this year and he actually suggested that he was going to create an entirely separate network at his store to have a separate IP address just so people could still leave reviews, but they would always be replying on different machines. I thought that was interesting.

JS: But, would he be recycling the IP address?

Nick: No, so he was actually talking about setting up an entirely different network with a different IP address that he would be paying extra money to support; just to be able to capture those on site.

JS: But, you would still see that there would be multiple, multiple, multiple entries from the same IP address.

Nick: You would, and that’s the type of thing that would have to be worked out with the concept of ‘how can I really verify that they have this kiosk in the store.’ And that’s something that I called out to him and I think that’s it’s something that we could probably do if we have someone going to that extent to keep things pure, but initially it would flag something on our side and probably other places to say that the volume coming in from one location is abnormally high. That’s where you would look at voice, you look at dates they came in, you look at scores…things like that.

JS: Makes sense. This is one of the most fascinating areas so I really appreciate you giving some thoughts on that. We have kind of talked about the dealers’ fears….How do you compare yourselves to a Yelp or Google Places or something like that?

Nick: And I kind of make a distinction between those two because Google is such a aggregator of all of the content that’s out there; usually the question that I’ll get is comparing us to Dealer Rater is the big one that comes up. Usually what I tell folks is that our goal was not to set ourselves up as a competitor to any of those sites. Typically when I talk to a dealer I tell them ‘the more places you have positive reviews out there, the better off you’re going to be.’ Because then, wherever people go, because we know people love Yelp, so all the more reason to have positive reviews there. The more places you have reviews, the more likely you are to catch all those various users across sites and see ‘yes, I’m going to have a positive experience at this store.’

I think this is one of the things that I strongly believe you want the content across as many places as possible and that’s when you start playing into Google, as they aggregate from every where, so once they see that there are enough reviews out there, all of a sudden on your Places page, you have a great amount of content, coming all across the Internet. All the more reason for who sees you on Google, says ‘you know what, I am ready to work with this store.’

Going further, I actually do suggest to folks who say ‘why should I be driving volume to Cars.com, rather than Yelp or Google or to Dealer Rater or wherever.’ I tell them, ‘you know, if you’re driving volume to three places just make us the fourth one.’ Again, it’s a win because they have more content out there. But I am not in any way trying to tell them that they should drive traffic to Cars.com because we have found that when people find the sites they like that’s the site they want to leave review content on. And that’s not a bad thing, whatsoever.

Really though, what we look at is, the story I always tell is one of our affiliate sales managers here told me back in December that she was shopping for a car, and she obviously went to Cars.com, she found the exact type of car she wanted. She then narrowed it down, she found the specific vehicle she wanted and she found the dealership where she thought she wanted to shop at, and then she left our site to go do additional research about that dealership. So, I just look at it as the more ways you can integrate that fantastic review content, where people are already digesting other information, the better off you’re going to be. And that’s really the whole reason we started getting into this. I say that the more places there are reviews out there, the better it is for everyone …. It’s just a huge win.

JS: Along those lines, do you have any agreements or discussions with Google Places, with Yahoo! Local, with bing Local, any of those places to use your material?

Nick: We have. I think what you’ll find with most of those places is that they all have their secret sauce and their own way of doing things, but typically the understanding is that you have to build up a certain amount of volume to be viewed as a credible source on this type of content, so we know that once we hit that it will be a lot easier to be aggregated, but our goal is certainly that once we have the volume we will make whatever site tweaks that we need to in order to be included in the aggregation.

JS: So, you definitely want to be included in the aggregation.

Nick: Absolutely. If it gets the content out there, it adds to the SEO value, so we definitely want that out there.

JS: Is there anything else you’d like to add as we wrap up the end of this?

Nick: The more places that content is our there, the better. We are certainly trying to encourage our dealers to view this as it’s an opportunity to really take control of what’s being said about you out there, so we’ve gone to the lengths of trying to provide them with various materials they can use in-store to drive volume. And again, I typically say, ‘if you’re already doing something, if you have banners for a different location, that’s fine. Just add us to the mix, one way or another. But you are driving the volume.’

I really look at it from a dealer perspective and one of the stories I heard from one of the dealers is that they’re viewing reputation management and reviews as a lead generator. So, what they do is look at it and track the number of phone calls they get, specifically from reviews, and they pay attention to the facts of how much more money can they make based on the fact that they have this great reputation that’s out there in the field. So, I’m just trying to convince people and say that this is a really good thing, assuming you really take advantage of it and you really start playing up your positive reputation, the better off it’s going to be for you.

JS: It’s interesting and we deal a lot of times with the opposite of it, where it’s not the wanting to get more leads (of course, they always want to), but when they look at online reviews and reputation management, at least in the beginning, it’s a question of ‘how can they stop any loss or perceived loss’ that is out there because they don’t have enough reviews or if there are some negative reviews out there. So, it’s really interesting to hear the flip-side of that, as well.

Nick: What we really have tried to talk to folks about, and we really have heard this over and over again, as we did our own market research…consumers kept telling us ‘you know, one negative review really isn’t the worst thing in the world and in a lot of cases it’s actually a positive. As when consumers see a lot of reviews that are all five stars as compared to similar scores that are 4.7, 4.8; that 4.7 has a lot more credibility because site users and digesters of information get the fact that every experience is not perfect and sooner or later, someone is going to have a bad day and it’s going to come off ‘not-perfect’.

So, when you do have some of those real-life experiences it’s actually a good thing. I also do try to convince people, when I do talk to them, that when you do get that person who did have a poor experience, it’s a great, great opportunity to leave the response indicating that they want to take personal responsibility for what happened, that it’s an aberration, that’s it’s not typically how you do business and you want to make sure that it goes right. Because all of a sudden, you’ve driven home to the people who come later on, that that’s not how you do business and that you really do care about each individual consumer.

So, yeah, we get it a lot, the first question of ‘what happens when I get a negative review,’ but we really do try to get people to understand that one negative review isn’t the worst thing in the world, and second there are all kind of ways for you to drive volume of positive reviews and the sooner that a dealer starts taking advantage of that and the sooner they start making it part of their process, the better off they’re going to be.

JS: My old boss used to say ‘You have two chances to meet someone….The first time you meet them and the first time you screw up.’ So along those lines, I’m a dealer and someone has just left a negative review. What mechanisms are in place to respond? Do I get to respond privately or only publicly, or am I able to respond to them at all? What are my recourses there?

Nick: This was one of the things that we debated most hotly before the launch; and so what we settled on was that anytime a review is posted the dealership always gets an opportunity to respond to it whether it’s positive or critical. And after they respond we close out the conversation. That was based on a large part on some of the feedback we heard from dealers that don’t do a lot in this space today. They were a little nervous about how much more process we’re going to build into this. So we didn’t want to get into the process of building a whole back and forth public exchange. I also think, anecdotely, I saw a decent amount of situations where that public back and forth just didn’t turn out terribly well. I think it’s just far easier, when you’re having that continued conversation, that you’re just going to regret one way or another.

The one thing that we’re keeping a very close eye on is the concept of allowing a private response before something gets posted. And originally, the way we landed is that we shied away from that because we really wanted the focus to be about your online reputation, less about a way to resolve customer service disputes. I think there’s a great amount of value in that and to be fair it’s kind of the norm in the industry right now. What we were really looking at is that we really have a substantial number of dealerships that don’t do this today and were very, very loud about the fact that they don’t want this proceeds to be complicated so we wanted it to be as simple as possible. That being said, we’re keeping a very, very close eye on the type of feedback that we get because we really need to make sure that if this is something we need to do, that we’re paying attention to it.

JS: Do you have any sort of automated notification system for the dealers if someone leaves a review or is it on them to check it themselves and monitor it daily?

Nick: We have a backend tool for dealers that we call My Dealer Center. And anytime a review is posted on Cars.com, meaning anytime it’s been through validation, moderation and it’s been approved, once it’s posted, the dealer automatically gets an email that says ‘You got a review posted on Cars.com. Please login by clicking this link and write a response to it’. We do make sure that we notify them, whether it’s a positive review or a critical one, we do notify them that it’s there and we do try to encourage them to reply to every single review not just to the ones that may be a review on a experience that was less than ideal.

JS: To me, I see a lot of fear from business owners about that….that it’s just going to be out there and they’re not going to know about it.

Nick: We definitely wanted to avoid that. I think it’s just one of those things that we saw as we got into this that there are places that have been aggregating for a long time and dealers just didn’t know what was there. So, we wanted to make sure that we are doing everything we can to warn them right off the bat.

I’d just like to publicly thank Nick and Cars.com for all their time and transparency regarding their dealer rating and review process.  If you’re shopping for a car, check them out.  Or if you’re a dealer, make sure you sign up for the My Dealer Center and start accepting reviews now!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?