Measurement

thumbs downBy Blair Kuhnen, BDX

This is the third of four blogs in our online reputation management series.

We previously covered online reputation management and steps in auditing and monitoring your online reputation. Now we will address responding to bad reviews.

Home building is a very human business and we, as humans, all make mistakes. The Internet amplifies those mistakes making them more visible. Gone are the days when you would address an issue that made it into print media and then quietly went away. Online reviews don’t go away. They have to be handled differently than other potentially negative public relations issues.

Don’t let negative brand or employment reviews cause further damage by going unanswered. Delays allow the current situation to escalate leading to lost sales or potential employees. That said, we believe there are right and wrong ways to respond.

It is uncomfortable to admit mistakes and takes courage to publically acknowledge them. Online, that is exactly what you have to do. This is important for two reasons: (1) When done right, it keeps the PR issue from escalating, and (2) it minimizes the ongoing damage of negative information that remains visible. This second point is what differentiates handling online vs. offline reviews. Potential customers and employees are going to see your response or lack thereof. Reviews handled with care will both prevent additional negative reviews and reduce the impact of the bad reviews.

We believe a builder should respond to a negative review in a timely, authentic, and humble manner. A personal and conversational tone is generally preferred. Here are some guidelines:

  • Show empathy: Apologize and express that you understand the pain/inconvenience caused. It does not matter if what they are saying is 100% accurate, you don’t want to debate or seem defensive. Try to understand their point of view and how the situation made them feel.
  • Demonstrate your contrition: Empathy alone is not enough. Express how your actions were wrong and what you are doing to fix it. Show that you are taking steps to make amends and prevent similar issues.
  • Without making excuses or sounding defensive, stress the positive: This is the tricky part, but an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. Let’s assume something positive (e.g., company growth) contributed to unintended employment related results. In this case, you should point out the jobs and advancements made possible through your growth, but admit to the negative consequences.
  • Ask for feedback: Ask the poster to come back and comment on how you did with resolving the issue.

When a prospective customer or employee reads your response, they should be thinking: “Some of the reviews I see here are bad but at least the company has acknowledged the issues and are seeking to find a resolution.” If someone wants to come to work for your company, they want to believe your story. If they don’t, you probably don’t need them.

Is this easy? No, but you can do it. I ran across this blog post from SEER Interactive that gives a good critique of several reviews on Yelp. It is worth a read before you draft your first response to a negative review.

When You Should Respond to a Poor Online Review

In general, faster is better. However, do not write a response while you are still angry as that could cause even more damage. Additionally, you don’t want to seem like you are in denial about the allegation even if the complaint is unfair.

There are times when you will not want to respond and maybe should not. When a negative review is pure slander, you might not respond. You might try to have the review deleted from the site or even consider legal action. These cases are few and far between.

Who Should Respond to a Negative Online Review

Unless you are Amazon, you probably don’t want your reply to come from someone with customer service in their title. In many cases, you should consider your president or a regional department head, but most importantly make sure someone is responding. You may want to consider providing a direct dial phone number that you can be reached at. Sometimes talking it out is better than corresponding through the web or email. While we are talking about negative reviews, responding to positive reviews humanizes the business and is a lot more fun for your CEO.

A colleague recently shared Glassdoor reviews of Zillow, a massive online real estate site with more than 500 employees. Their CEO, Spencer Rascoff, directly responds to many of the Zillow reviews with humility and a style that probably helps their recruiting effort.

An Example of How to Respond to a Poor Glass Door Review

This builder used in this example is growing quickly. Strong revenue growth creates huge opportunities for all employees if they seize them. Start by thanking the poster for their feedback. Read the review carefully and make sure you directly address specific issues.

blair-blog-5

This company needs to support its current strong employees while only recruiting the best. This response is crucial:

  • You want to communicate to prospective posters that you recognize your growing pains and are taking action. We believe employees will be less likely to post negative reviews if they see a solid response followed up with action.
  • A solid response allows prospective employees to see the opportunities your company has to offer while minimizing their hesitations.

A Hypothetical Recommended Response to this Review:

“Thank you for pointing out some of the problems related to our recent growth. We did not do well. Our team is the backbone of our success. Our rapid growth has created tremendous opportunities for career advancement, but it stretched our systems. We are sorry that we have left some employees feeling they are not supported and in some cases we asked for more than what was fair. That is a terrible feeling especially when you work as hard as our employees do.

This has been an area of concern for executive management. We left employees far too stretched and failed to delegate authority that would have made your lives easier.

In response we are implementing our company-wide leadership training and development program in January and are speeding our recruitment efforts to handle our continued growth. We need to get new employees up to speed faster with our processes and procedures so they can serve customers better. We will not grow revenue and profits at the rate we desire without a well-trained, motivated, and loyal team leading the charge.

Finally, we need to push authority down further and are currently experimenting with ways to give additional decision making and spending authority to our field personnel.

Please return later and re-post or reply anonymously to tell us how we have done.”

Over the top? Maybe, but this type of response can make an immediate impact. This may be difficult the first time, but it gets easier. You will feel better having responded and may have more clearly identified how to improve your business.

This blog series has given you a good understanding of how online reputation management works, from how to complete a reputation audit to providing recommendations for responding to negative reviews. Do you still have bad reviews out there on page one or page two of Google search results? Stay tuned for the final post in this series where we will show you how to get your positive reviews ranking higher in Google search results.

 

By BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

Tweet, tweet, tweet! Many home builders, real estate agents and industry suppliers have finally started tweeting their content and creating buzz with their interaction. However, Twitter users and skeptics alike still want to prove that their time and energy is worth it. Luckily, help proving the return on investment on Twitter is finally here! Recently, Twitter released a new analytics platform which provides users with a wealth of useful and insightful account information.

Among the information available when a company or user logs into the analytics portal is a timeline glimpse of your follows, unfollows and mentions over the last 60 days. Below the timeline is a chart displaying recent tweets along with retweets, favorites and replies each specific tweet received. To see which content is among your most actionable, users can sort this data to show your “best” or “good” tweets, including highlighted statistics on which tweets or actions fall within your top 15 percent for the past 30 days. Businesses can make the most of the data from this chart by noting what types of content or tweets are most successful, and applying this information to future tweets.

Switching to the followers view, users can see the growth of their followers since the account was created. A further breakdown of  followers’ location by country, state and city; gender; interests and who else they are following provides interesting insight that can help companies strategically plan tweets to appeal to their audience demographics.

Ready to start tweeting more relevant content for your Twitter followers? Be sure to bookmark this URL, which takes you directly to the Twitter analytics login page: https://analytics.twitter.com/accounts/1edxhg/timeline_activity.

By Thane Tennison, Advertising Manager, BDX

One of the greatest benefits of online advertising is the ability to track performance and make data driven decisions.  As a marketer these data points allow you to qualify performance, optimize spend and manage ROI.  However, without the proper tracking elements in place before you begin, it can be much harder to understand which advertising channels are driving the greatest value.

There are lots of software solutions to help online marketing managers track and analyze performance including Omniture, Webtrends, and Google Analytics; most of the builders we work with have Google Analytics installed.  The service is free and automatically integrates with other Google services such as paid search.  Google UTM Tracking Codes allow marketers the ability to track activity from third party sites like listings on NewHomeSource or a banner campaign. Tracking URLs are quick and easy to set up and can provide a wealth of information regarding performance of listings, banners, emails and more. At BDX, we’re a strong advocate of implementing tracking not only to help our clients highlight performance, but also to help us improve our products and services.  

The following is how you can implement tracking codes and keep them organized.

I recommend keeping a consistent naming convention. This will pay dividends when you want to look at performance over a long period of time or when comparing two different channels.  Google’s UTM codes are case sensitive so “BDX_listings” and “bdx_listings” can appear as two separate line items and distort actual performance.  A consistent naming convention will also help keep things organized. Having some campaigns labeled “Banners” and others “Display” will create a lot of extra work when reviewing performance.

WHAT TO TRACK:

Campaign Source:  Where are you receiving your traffic? For builders this could be from BDX, Realtor.com, NHSPro, Zip Realty, Trulia, Zillow etc.  Keeping the source consistent will also help you understand the services you have with each product. For example, if you have listings with BDX as well as a banner campaign you’d want keep the source for both as “BDX.”

Campaign Medium:  The medium is the type of service.  Listings, banner, email are the most common mediums used by builders.  By consolidating into these three buckets it’s easy to compare performance of all your banner campaigns or traffic from all or your listing services.

Campaign Name:  The third level of segmentation helps you differentiate creative and offers. If you’re running the same art across multiple networks this field should be the same for each network.  Many builders who advertise across multiple markets will identify the market here. It makes for any easy filter when you want to compare performance for a particular division.

Campaign Content: If you’re doing A/B testing between offers or have multiple links from the same source you could use the content filter to drill into performance for each link. For example, if you wanted to differentiate incoming traffic from Realtor.com listings vs. the Realtor.com Ryder Sign, you could differentiate using the “content” field.  For advertisers who want to review ad performance by size I’d also recommend this field.

As a marketing manager, you’ll need as much information as possible to manage and optimize performance and I would recommend adding UTM tracking to every link and paid media source.  However, starting with a plan and maintaining a clear naming convention will make it easier to review performance year over year and allow for greater and easier segmentation.                                                                                                     

Below is an example of how I would set up some common links used at BDX.

 

With tracking codes in place, you will be better equipped to make the smart decisions and optimize for a better ROI.  For example, you might find that you’re getting a great rate and a lot of traffic from one advertising vendor but the traffic tends to have a high bounce rate and those consumers don’t convert into home sales while other more expensive channels drive more value and therefore may have a better return.  You may decide you want to test a new marketing initiative and need an established benchmark to gauge success and justify the program.

  If you have questions about setting up tracking links or creating campaign goals in Google Analytics please feel free to contact me.

Thane Tennison is the Advertising Manager for the BDX and manages hundreds of home builder brands across a network of over a dozen real estate websites.

 

 

 

 

By Thane Tennison, Advertising Manager, BDX

Last month the BDX network served over 2.8 million clicks. However, not all of those clicks were sent to an advertiser’s website. Many of those clicks were identified as Bots and filtered out of our reporting. The Bot Filter is just one of the services BDX provides to help optimize performance for our builder advertisers. 

Bots are a piece of software that scan websites and follow web links to create an index for major search engines. They’re not something a consumer would notice in their regular online activity but can have a profound affect for a webmaster looking at traffic and click trends.

In our BDX Ad reporting we typically see Bot Traffic as spikes in click thru activity for a builder.  For example, a builder may average a .20 Click-Thru Rate (CTR) but occasionally performance will spike to five percent over a short period of time.  By cross referencing the domain and IP we can typically identify and block the bot. However, other Bot Traffic is not as obvious and may appear as regular click activity.  This is especially true if an advertiser is running GIF/JPEG files that will record all click activity (the Javascript in a SWF File or Ad Tag will typically filter the bot click).

In our review of Bot Traffic BDX has identified a series of browsers and IPs that represent three percent of all traffic but as much as twenty percent of the clicks for our builder advertisers. These clicks are recorded in our ad server but may not appear in a builder’s Google Analytics (After all, Google runs several bots of their own and automatically filters that traffic).  The result is a natural discrepancy between publishers’ reports and what a builder sees in their analytics. Meaning publishers could report a high number of clicks & high CTR but the advertiser sees relatively little value.

By implementing the Bot Filter BDX is able to provide more accurate reporting that closely aligns to a builder’s backend reporting across all of the BDX advertising products from BeBack to Realtor.com. With more accurate reporting, we can better work with our advertisers to optimize their campaigns and improve our product offerings.

Many publishers and ad severs do have a bot filter included in their service and will only capture known bots identified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. They don’t actively manage new bots regularly introduced into the market nor do I think most publishers apply the same level of scrutiny as BDX to identify these occasional spikes in click traffic.

If you’re working with a publisher and running online campaigns I’d recommend auditing performance to ensure numbers closely align to what’s reported.  Setting up UTM tracking codes and developing campaign goals in Google Analytics are some easy ways to help track performance across different channels and optimize your media flight. As many of our advertisers work with limited resources it’s important that they have accurate data to make the right decisions regarding their marketing efforts.  At BDX we work with several of our advertisers to help set up campaign goals allowing them to truly understand the value of their online advertising. 

If you’d like additional information on some of the unique services BDX provides to optimize builder campaigns or assistance in setting up tracking in Google Analytics please contact me at traffic@thebdx.com.

Thane Tennison is the Advertising Manager for the BDX and manages hundreds of home builder brands across a network of over a dozen real estate websites.