Star Ratings on Google *****

[realityhack]

Does anyone have experience with any of the companies that Google uses to produce it's star ratings on PPC ads?

Specifically anyone like Reseller Ratings that is a pay for play company?
Are the costs and aggravation to exiting customers justified by increased sales from showing a good rating?

Bizrate
Epinions
Mr. Rebates
PriceGrabber.com
PriceSpider.com
ResellerRatings.com
Review Centre
TRUSTPILOT
Viewpoints
Yahoo!

ETC...

[TcxAnthony]

We use Bizrate. I believe we don't pay anything for it, Bizrate basically treats reviews like a raffle for the customer. I.E. Fill out this survey, enter to win free dinner at such and such. The stars we get (shows almost 2000 reviews) definitely helps with sales and CTR. I don't know much about the others, we have about 5 reviews on reseller ratings but that site doesn't seem too popular.

[realityhack]

Do customers ever mention the popup for bizrate being annoying? Ever done a study on any negative brand association?

I am not an average user but I friken hate bizrate popups (same for the others).

[TcxAnthony]

I haven't had any complaints from any customers. I know that with Bizrate there is a way to control the aggressiveness of the pop-ups(unfortunately I don't know how to do this, it came up one conversation with our Vice President), when we had that set high we did get complaints but that was a few years ago. Where we are now, no complaints and plenty of positive feedback.

[rickeliason]

When I worked inhouse we used TrustPilot and were very impressed. You can customize the email template that gets sent out to customers so you can really get your company's tone of voice across as well as using engaging images and image-based call-to-actions.

It was very easy to set up and we got some excellent reviews from it (I would estimate 1 in 6 responded - bearing in mind we offered NO incentive to do so). The user experience with TrustPilot is very good which is my main belief as to why we got such a good response rate.

The consistent reviews meant that we moved up in Google Shopping and were top for many key products (as well as standing out from competitors). We also did better in Organic though I can't contribute this to the positive reviews. However, our conversion rate did increase so I definitely think it justified the fees (we implemented their editable widget on key pages throughout the site which dynamically updated with new/featured reviews).

Before that we did manual requests for reviews but didn't get such a great response. Although I haven't used any other similar services, I always pitch TrustPilot to relevant clients now that I work in an agency.

I hope that helps
Rick