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Responding to Unfavorable Online Reviews

Getting a bad review online can be maddening, but don’t make it worse by responding without putting in a lot of thought to how your own response will be perceived by other future customers.

I have a client who had a very poor review. When you are in business, you can’t please everyone, but in this case the office manager shot off a rebuttal that when I read it, I just cringed. It made a bad situation much worse. It portrayed the office staff as angry, resentful, argumentative, and vindictive. OUCH!

Sometimes a bad review can be a wakeup call. When you get a bad review, step back and look at it, could it be truthful, or have a grain of truth to it? It is very important to take a careful look to make sure that there is not a change needed on your part such as a change in office policy, customer service, or staff retraining.

If you feel that a rebuttal must be made. Focus on the positive, express concern for a problem, offer special attention from top management to repair the situation. Encourage the reviewer to recontact the office for a refund, redo, or credit on future service. Don’t write a hot rebuttal that trashes the reviewer or accuses them of being unfair or dishonest. This will only work to hurt you and make you look like the review was really true based on your hot angry response.

You can’t fight unfair reviews, but you can work to soften the blow and maybe even become better by taking the review as constructive criticism. Just be careful in your response and work to repair a poor situation not to make it worse with your own comments.

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Know Your Cost Per Acquisition to Be Profitable with AdWords

To use pay per click advertising successfully you really need to know what your cost per acquisition is or rather how much you are willing to spend to get a new customer and still have profit left over. Without knowing your cost per acquisition, you can actually be paying Google AdWords for each new customer sale you make or each new customer your get. Google will work hard to spend your money, but it is your job to make AdWords profitable for you.

So, do you know how much it costs for each customer? How to you figure this out? A lead conversion in Google AdWords does not mean a sale. The formula for each business is different. One of my clients told me that for their business, it takes 10 leads to make a sale. Typically the higher the value or price of your service, the more lead conversions you will need to make a sale.

AdWords will track the lead conversions for you, but you need to track sales generated and each month look at the sales generated, total spent on advertising in all areas and then extrapolate to determine your cost per acquisition. In some cases when clients review this information they find which avenue is a better lead generator for their business or that one is more cost effective to use than another. Without this additional information and careful review, you may be spending more than you should on generating new business.

Once you know your desired or average cost per acquisition, Google AdWords has some excellent tools to help balance your traffic and cost per click to keep you within your profit restraints. The conversion optimizer with a maximum cost per acquisition setting is an excellent tool. You can balance what you want to spend with what Google recommends. Remember however that Google is in the business to serve clicks and you need conversions and sales so make sure that the setting you use does not stretch your margin too tightly.

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Are You Watching Your Website Stats? Why Not?

You can’t find out if your website is working for you if you never take a look at your website statistics! It is great to have a website and every business should have one, but sometimes just having one is not enough. Sometimes you need to “nurture” and “feed” your website to help it be the best promotion vehicle in your advertising arsenal.

When I say “nurture” and “feed” your website I mean specifically know what your website visitors are looking for when they come to visit, how long they stay, and what they do when they get there. I have found in many cases by a careful analysis of website statistics will allow us to recommend new pages, optimization, and areas for enhanced engagement with readers. Here’s just one example: from the integrated web search report we get for a client we found over and over that users were searching for a specific product. Based on this information, to make it easy for them to find it and to feed sales, we created new content on the home page to speak to this need and point readers to the shopping and more information sections on the product. In other cases, reviewing Google Analytics, we have found new search terms to use for optimization of content, new terms for AdWords programs, and services that readers are looking for and possibly not finding.

One key indicator to review in Google Analytics is a page’s bounce rate. Over 75% and you have some challenges that you need to address as your readers are not finding what they want or you are directing untargeted traffic to the page with pay per click programs and may need to add negative keywords to your program to cut costs and be more targeted.

A careful review of  your website statistics can be used to really review your online health. It is more than a gage of how many visitors you have a day, the wealth of information can help you develop new services, cater to an audience, and more carefully target pay per click advertising. As Google Analytics is free, there is simply no reason you should not be tracking and reviewing what is going online with your website.

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Alternative Browsers: Have You Tried One?

All the sudden IE9 simply would not allow me to login to my Google AdWords MCC control panel. I am sure it was a change in an update to a security setting done by an automatic update. For a full week I pulled my hair out. I tried to troubleshoot the problem, dropped my cookies, deleted my cache, tried to import cookies from a computer that allowed me on, tweaked registry settings; all to no avail. I was simply locked out with a grey screen.

Sounds like maybe no big deal, right? However if you spend hours and sometimes all day on Google AdWords, as I do for clients, this was a REALLY big deal. In fact, so big I decided that maybe it was time to simply move to a new browser and scrap IE9. I had Firefox installed and also Google Chrome. My assistant swears by Chrome but that is because IE9 works quirkily on his Windows 7 64 bit computer.

I really tried to like Firefox, really! I migrated everything there for two full weeks and worked exclusively with that browser. What I found was that I could get on AdWords just fine but there were two things that I really hated.

  1. On downloading files – which I do a lot of from writers sending me things via YouSendIt.com, the save file as interface is goofy and not streamlined. There simply was no way to streamline the interface.
  2. I hated the bookmark tool. IE9 does have Firefox beat when it comes to bookmarks, organization, and showing them while browsing.

I really tried to like Google Chrome too! I lasted about two days with this browser. Sure it was speedy, but the big drawback was bookmarks. As I live by my bookmarks having to check writers on our client blogs, I have an extensive listing of bookmarks and logins that are used daily and more than daily. I don’t want to hunt around and I want things to be in the order I determine.

Guess what? I am back on IE9 now for everything except Google AdWords, and there I use Firefox. I just simply like the elegance of the browser chrome (frame surrounding the screen), I really like how bookmarks are done and managed, and I really like the very simple streamlined interface for saving files with one “save as” drop down.

Now in your case, you may swear by Firefox, or you may love Google Chrome, but if you have never tried either one I recommend that you do. You won’t personally know which is best for your own needs until you really give them a go. In fact did you know that Chrome is now 20% of the browsing market as of just this past week? Internet Explorer has shrunk to 59% of the market and Firefox has dropped to 28% according to StatCounter. (Read the article.) Take them both for a test drive and see what you think. You may be like me and say ahh, there is no place like IE9!