Following Google’s mass purge of dealer customer reviews last summer, auto retailers have been looking at alternative strategies when it comes receiving online feedback.
Although Google is now extremely well-established when it comes to influencing online shoppers, dealers felt outraged that the search engine giant decided to change its formula for including reviews on dealers’ Google+ pages, without providing details on reasons for the purge. As a result more and more of them have been looking to sites such as DealerRater and Cars.com, where they feel they’re more likely to get a fair shake. According to Heather MacKinnon, vice president of sales at DealerRater, the site has seen a 10 per cent increase in monthly reviews since the Google purge. Meanwhile, Cars.com said it has now received more than 100,000 dealer customer reviews since it began accepting them back in 2011. In fact some dealers managed to minimize the impact of the Google debacle by choosing to focus on other services from the beginning.
In an interview with Automotive News, Eley Duke III, of Duke Automotive in Suffolk, Va., said, “we never solicited Google reviews, not because we were really smart or anything. We just felt the reviews we got on DealerRater would be authentic and legitimate.”
Duke Automotive, which sells about 60 new and used vehicles each month, has seen its 232 reviews on DealerRater earn 4.9 out of five stars – by contrast, on Google+ Local the store has seen its review ratings plummet, down to just 16 points out of a total of 30 on Google’s current scale rating.
Google says its review system allows consumers “to make make informed decisions about businesses and services that interest them,” and although it says more than 10 million reviews are available on Google+ Local pages across all industries, it hasn’t revealed how many are dealership specific.
