No matter how many success stories we create, virtually no campaign ever runs as smoothly as we’d like. That’s just the nature of online advertising. Working in conjunction with independent entities like search engines, phone companies, and business directories means there’s a lot that’s out of our control. All anyone can do is keep an eye out for sudden changes and adapt accordingly.
In this newsletter, we’ll address a few of the pain-points and campaign concerns that Prospect Genius clients have encountered lately and explain what we’re doing to mitigate them.
Faulty Yahoo! PINs
Many clients have had trouble recently with their Yahoo! PINs. When your PIN gets sent to you, you turn it in to us, but when we try to input it on Yahoo! it just doesn’t work. While we’re not sure of what’s causing this problem, we are aware that it exists and we have been staying on top of it. We’ve spoken to Yahoo! but we haven’t had any luck resolving the problem.
While this may sound like a huge setback, it’s actually not. Frankly, Yahoo! is not a major search engine; very few Internet users actually rely on it as their search engine of choice. In fact, according to comScore, Yahoo’s market share has dropped to just 10.1%, a record low, as of March 2014.
Moreover, we do hundreds of other off-page tasks to support all of our search engine work. With everything else that we do for your campaign, a missing Yahoo! PIN is not the end of the world.
As always, we’re staying on top of this issue and will update you as additional information becomes available.
Call-Time Upgrades
Contrary to popular belief, phone minutes are not free. Even Verizon and AT&T have to pay line charges for minutes used on the networks that blanket the country. So when clients voice concern over having their call-time packages upgraded, it’s because they don’t understand the reason behind it.
Many clients complain about having their call-time packages upgraded, but they don’t understand what it actually is.
Prospect Genius institutes a call-time upgrade when clients get so many calls that they exceed the allotted number of minutes in their original phone packages. We often refer to it as a “homerun tax” because it’s caused by the fact that their campaigns are generating such a massive volume of leads.
We begin every one of our campaigns with the smallest phone package because it doesn’t make sense to charge our clients for a larger package if they aren’t going to use all of those minutes. Upgrading your phone package is necessary because you’re spending more time on the phone with customers than the original package allows.
The upgrade is a pass-through cost; it’s not designed to profit Prospect Genius in any way. We pass this minimal cost ($9/month) on to you because, if we didn’t, we would not have any incentive to make your campaign successful. Think about it: If we had to pay out of pocket for extra phone minutes that resulted from too many leads, then why would we want to keep sending you more leads? By passing the cost on to you, we are protecting both of our best interests.
Yelp Reviews Not Sticking
We also hear concerns from clients about their Yelp reviews. With Yelp’s strict filters, which are powered by confounding algorithms, many businesses are realizing that random customer reviews aren’t appearing on their pages. It’s a very valid concern, given how many businesses use Yelp as part of their overall online advertising campaign.
From what we’ve learned of Yelp’s review filtering policies, we can tell you that it primarily filters out reviews posted by brand-new accounts. In other words, if a user created a brand-new account to leave you a review or just didn’t leave many other reviews before leaving one on your page, Yelp will likely filter it out of your list of reviews. The filter system is intended to prevent potential spamming, but the result is that it also affects new, honest users.
While Prospect Genius doesn’t have the power to change Yelp’s policies, we do have recommendations for getting around them. For starters, only ask customers to leave you a review on Yelp if they have a well established account. Additionally, we’re fortunate to have several other prominent online platforms that also show ratings and reviews. Facebook and Google+ pages are both great alternatives to Yelp, so take advantage of them.
As always, if you have any campaign concerns that you’d like to address, call your campaign coordinator or account manager. We’ll listen carefully and accommodate whatever needs you have.
