Gating - an important warning

What, exactly, is gating? It's the practice of using a formal mechanism to identify those customers most likely to write a positive review of your business. And it's illegal.

Why is gating illegal?

Because it is demonstrably an attempt by the business engaged in gating to hide the reality of its customers' real opinions of that business.

Not only is gating illegal - expressly against the UK CMA's regulations - it is also against Google's terms of service. The difference between the action the CMA might take and Google? Any CMA action will have the force of law, Google will simply delete every single review of any business it deems to have engaged in gating, with no recourse to appeal

It is a refinement of cherry-picking, which is even more common: selecting known happy customers to write reviews. Again: illegal.

N.B.

For those of you who like chapter and verse: here is the relevant UK legal position. If, having read that, you recognise any of your business practices we suggest you a) stop and b) call us.

Back to gating - in practice

There is more than one way to gate. Here is the most common process:

1.  Employ a relatively insignificant review site. Every review site, including Trustpilot, Feefo and Yelp, is 'insignificant' in every way - reach, visibility, influence, credibility - by comparison with Google.

2.  Invite all customers to write a review there

3.  Then invite only those who have written a 5* review to copy it to Google

It's as simple - and as easy - as that.

The second most popular mechanism:

1.  Conduct a customer survey - of every customer

2.  Then invite only those who have written positive comments to write a review to Google

If anything, even simpler.

An example...

A business on Trustpilot:

And the same business on Google:

By combining cherry-picking (only to Google) and gating a business can make itself look even better.

What action is being taken?

In the UK? The CMA has instituted an investigation into malpractice. Google? They have already acted against businesses - one law firm in the US recently had all its reviews deleted. In practice it is likely to be very similar to HMRC action - driven by complaints by whistleblowers - the CMA is actively canvassing for insider knowledge of infringments. And those whistleblowers? Likely as not ex-members of staff.

Killing the goose..

Reviews are the 'golden egg' of marketing. Currently they are trusted by over 80 percent of consumers as much as a personal recommendation from a friend. As a result they drive considerable business towards those businesses that rank and rate well. 

But businesses that engage in gating and cherry-picking are not helping anyone, even themselves. Over time, consumers - who currently trust reviews (Google reviews, at least) will become more and more cynical, reviews, as a concept, will become devalued, and we will all be the poorer for it.

And finally...

Our question for readers of this article? Why, if it is not for gating purposes, would any business invite reviews anywhere else but Google? Feel free to comment below.

Reviews - a guide for consumers

Some businesspeople reading this may wonder what an article directed at their customers is doing here. The answer is pretty straightforward: to understand how review management works in any depth it is vitally important to understand how consumers view and interact with reviews. It is also sometimes useful to have a ready response to the question 'Why should I do as you ask [and post a review to your website/Google]?'. 

To begin with, let us take a brief look at the evolution of online reviews. In the days before the web consumers had three main resources when it came to identifying the right service or product for their needs:

• prior experience of the business or product in question
• word of mouth: friends, neighbours, or colleagues who had previous experience of the business or product in question
• 'professional' reviews published in the media

And one smaller one:

• the 'Which?' organisation - with, currently, half-a-million subscribers

This all changed with the advent of what generally became known as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was the nickname given to the interactive web, led by forums and evolving into social media - where the web moved from enabling businesses to simply offer their wares and services to consumers interacting with those businesses through their websites and other sites independent of the businesses.

Early examples

One obvious example, known to us all, is TripAdvisor. Founded as an online travel agency pure-and-simple, TripAdvisor stumbled upon the power of reviews almost by accident: here's TripAdvisor's founder, Steve Kaufer, in a BBC interview back in 2014...

"We started as a site where we were focused more on those official words from guidebooks or newspapers or magazines. We also had a button in the very beginning that said, 'Visitors add your own review', and boy, did that just take off."

Even more review-focussed from day one was Angie's List. Founded pre-web as a simple list of local building contractors, its evolution into a sort of Which? for US consumers - with about the same market penetration - has been driven by reviews attached to each listing.

Then came the first of the all-encompassing - in theory at least - sites: Yelp! Yelp aimed to be a one-stop site for consumers requiring peer reviews of businesses. 

All three had their drawbacks:

• TripAdvisor was, by its very nature, restricted to hospitality businesses and to this very day is dogged by accusations that it is far too easily gamed by interested parties: the businesses bigging up their own listings and their competitors doing their very best to knock them down.

• Angie's List began as a subscription-only service - like Which? - at a time when one of the key buzzwords on the web was 'make content free'. As a result it tends to gain subscribers when they are in 'spending mode', specifically around home moves, and lose them when that need declines.

• Yelp! has never managed to square its business model with its conflicting stakeholders' (and shareholders') needs. It sells uplifted listings and CPI advertising which is distinctly unpopular with major brands and some of its core target audience - SMEs and their customers. The SMEs resent paying to appear in search and consumers resent what they see as paid-for shills heading their results.

Product reviews

While all this US activity had centred mainly around service businesses, from hotels to pizza parlours, in 2007 a Danish entrepreneur noticed a gap in the market: product reviews. Along came...

• Trustpilot: predicated on the idea that consumers are far more likely to buy a product, whether that be a shirt or a washing machine, that is highly-rated by their peers. A free alternative to Which? if you will (but hosting consumer, rather than expert, opinions).

So what now?

You can see there is now - at least there was back in 2015 - a website catering for every consumer need for reviews. And that, in itself, was, besides being a solution, a part of the emerging problem: consumers - and businesses - were beginning to be confused by the variety of review solutions out there. Which to use when? Look at travel and hospitality alone:

• Tripadvisor
• Trivago
• Booking.com
• Expedia
• Hotels.com
• Orbitz
• Travelocity
• Kayak
• Hotels combined

Just examining the pros and cons of one of these would take up a whole article - and often has (see 'Further reading' below)!

But then, thankfully for all concerned, along came a business with the reach and the resources to cover virtually the whole spectrum, and for free. And the name of that 'Johnnie come lately'? Google.

Google enters the reviews sphere

Google, as is its habit, tiptoed into the world of reviews, first via the now-defunct Google Places and then Google Maps. When they were confident they had their offering right they brought it right forward into the prominent place in all Google searches it maintains to this day.

What did Google get so right?

1.  By its very nature: coverage. There isn't a business in the free world that isn't listed on Google. Google hosts reviews of all businesses. Near you. Or anywhere on earth.

2.  Visibility: Google is the gatekeeper. Everyone has to go through Google, so everyone sees Google reviews. Back in 2017 Rightmove conducted a survey on behalf of estate agents and asked respondents about reviews, here is the result...

'Where reviews were read, most (42%) were on Google, followed by agents’ own website (36%), Trustpilot (11%), allAgents (6%) and Feefo (2%).' 

..and we're betting the Google figure would be far higher if they conducted the same survey again today.  

3.  Credibility: one of the main stumbling blocks of other reviews sites is the ability - for businesses and consumers alike - to be confident that their reviews are being written by genuine customers of the business concerned. Google has a huge advantage here, and one it is yet to make real capital of, it knows where the reviewer has been, what they have searched for and, almost always, who they work for, as well as a plethora of other information. 

 

Google reviews, for that reason alone, invariably win for credibility. They can be trusted - and they are. That doesn't mean that there are not some very 'wrong' Google reviews out there (see 'Moderation' under 'Further reading' at the bottom of this article), but it does mean that Google knows who wrote them.

 4.  Product reviews? Google have those covered too: for free (sorry, Trustpilot)

Now some 'tricks of the trade'

With reviews now being so critical for businesses (the Harvard Business Review has conducted extensive research directly correlating business flows with review scores), you will not be surprised to hear that some businesses will go to extreme lengths to ensure they look good. Here we will outline some of the most common wheezes - when we say 'wheezes' we are being polite, what we actually mean is 'deception' and 'illegality' - and show you how to spot them.

• Cherry-picking: the business only asks customers who it knows will rate them five stars to post reviews. It is illegal but very common. How to spot? The only sure-fire way is to either become a customer and see if you get asked to post a review or ask someone else who has used the business if they were asked. Ex-employees often give the game away and the CMA, in the UK, have the power to sequester emails to see if all customers have been invited. Just ask to write a review; if the business says anything along the lines of 'You have to wait until...' or 'You cannot unless...' alarm bells should ring.

Another cherry-picking giveaway is the pattern of the business's reviews. Does it reflect the volume you would expect? Or is it 'lumpy' - many reviews one month and none the next.

• Gating: a sophisticated version of cherry-picking, against the law in the UK and Google's own terms of service. It involves inviting customers, sometimes every customer, to either write a review to a little-known site or complete a 'customer survey'. The business then only invites those who have indicated complete satisfaction to go on to write a Google review. If Google sees it happening they will delete all of the business in question's reviews, unilaterally, without giving the business recourse to appeal - despite this we see it happening often. How to tell? A major disparity in the business's score on the reviews site of their choice and Google (review site low, Google high) and significantly higher volume of reviews to the reviews site than to Google.

• Controlling the timing: where the business sends out the invitation to write the review at the most favourable time for getting a positive response, commonly done by online retailers within a week of purchase; that action is not, of itself, illegal unless the customer is then unable to return to write a further review at a later date (or modify their original review, which is the case with Google). One high-profile UK review site operates in this way. With Google the reviewer can edit their review at any time and as often as they like. How to spot? Simply ask the business where you can write a review - now. If the answer is 'I'm afraid you will have to wait until we invite you' head for the hills.

So: our advice to consumers

Maybe worth spending a few minutes reading the actual reviews of the businesses - estate agent (£2,780), conveyancing solicitor (£1,046), removals firm (£1,181), mortgage broker (£450) - you're considering using?

Use Google. When you are considering using any business whatsoever, but especially high-value service businesses where a wrong choice could cost you thousands - financial and legal services, medical and health services, estate agency and the like. 

Read the actual reviews themselves. So many consumers see a headline score - after all 4 out of 5 is OK, isn't it? NO! 4 out of 5 means that twenty percent of that business's customers rate the business 1 out of 5, and, given that you cannot rate a business less than one..!

Question the business about its negative reviews. Read its responses to those reviews.

If the business has few - or even no - Google reviews, ask them why.

Be especially sceptical of any business that uses any other review mechanism. Ask them why they use [Trustpilot/Yelp/Feefo...]. And ask them why they do not use Google - it's free, after all, and they will be paying the others.

Isn't this all a bit long-winded?

Yes - if you're buying a pizza. But not if you're choosing an oncologist or an estate agent. where the former may be a case of life and death and where you will be paying tens of thousands in fees to the latter.

Where does HelpHound fit into this scheme of things?

A typical HelpHound client's homepage: the 'Write a review' button at top right enables anyone - anyone at all - to write a review whenever they choose to do so, the button to its left enables anyone wishing to read all of the business's reviews to do so, instantly. This gives the business's reviews credibility which, when combined with the ensuing automatic invitation to copy the review to Google, is as absolute as can possibly be. We can confidently - and proudly - say there is no superior solution to reviews in the third decade of the 21st century than this.

HelpHound began life as a review site, but we soon realised that we could add far more value, for both businesses and consumers, if we became an intermediary; providing advice and moderation to businesses and the ensuing really high-quality reviews for consumers.

This meant that we were ideally placed when Google entered the marketplace: we could recommend Google reviews wholeheartedly to our business customers while they learned very quickly to value our service as moderators. All our business clients' invite the reviews you see displayed on their website using our software - and this enables our moderators to check every review for factual inaccuracies and potentially misleading comments pre-publication. 

This service is vital if reviews are to add value for both business and consumer. And we are happy to say it has proved itself and continues to prove itself day-by-day. As a consumer, you can be sure that a HelpHound's client's reviews - whether on their own website or on Google - are a true reflection of the business you are considering.

Further reading...

1. Moderation - the vital ingredient in professional review management
2. Trustpilot - taking the 'trust' out of reviews? and criticism from the Times analysed
3. Independent review sites - the unintended consequences for a business's Google rating
4. Compliance: the CMA regulations and the law
5. Yelp! - the largest review site on the planet departs the UK and the EU
6. Gating - the Google ban and the consequences of flouting it
7. Cherry-picking - some examples and more advice

ABC of Reviews: 6. How are your competitors gaming the system?

We will begin this section with a challenge: find us a business outside the hospitality sector with more than a hundred reviews on Google that is not gaming the system (very, very few people will write a review of a service business without first being asked - we still come across reasonably large firms of financial advisers and medical practices that have no Google reviews).

Let us explain: 

Given that it is illegal to selectively invite customers to write a review or to control the timing of that review one would look for evidence that both of those requirements were being complied with. Here's the kind of thing...

This 'write a review' button you see just to the right of the star rating opens a box where anyone can write a review, whenever thy like. That does not stop the business asking, but it does mean that there is far less incentive for anyone with an axe to grind to go direct to Google to vent their spleen.  

Without a visible mechanism like this, there will always be the suspicion that the business is controlling the 'who' and the 'when'. We meet businesses who say...

• 'but we email all our customers inviting them to post a review'
• 'we have a link embedded in our email signature block that goes to a similar box'

But those two beg the questions...

• define 'customer'? Is someone who came to a meeting but has not yet signed on the dotted line a 'customer'? No? But they are perfectly capable of writing a review. Is your customer's husband/wife/business colleague not just as much a customer, in spite of not appearing on your email database? Is someone who did business with you last year a 'customer'?
• do all your customers, in the widest sense of the word, receive such emails? 

Reasoning like this comes under the heading of 'accidental gaming' where the business is doing their best, innocently breaching regulations or simply deflecting some stakeholders, for better or for worse, who want to write reviews. Deflecting them straight to Google (for a complete article on the acute dangers of such deflection read this).

Now we come on to those that are cynically and purposely exploiting reviews. Knowingly breaching one or more of the CMA regulations and/or Google's terms of service.

The 'selectors'

Businesses that intentionally cherry-pick (the CMA uses that term) happy customers and then only invite those to post a review. A refinement of this process is to choose a time when customers are at their most happy - when they have just bought a product (how do readers know that the shoes will wear a decent length of time?) or service (how can a client possibly be expected to judge their chosen financial adviser's abilities immediately post-investment?).

How can you spot them?

Cherry-picking is difficult to spot as an outside observer but very easy to identify for the regulators and Google; controlled timing is easier: multiple mentions of words such as 'I have just bought...', 'we have just instructed...' or 'our first experience of...' give the game away.

The 'filterers'

Also known as 'gating' - more here, filtering can be done in a variety of ways:

• ask customers to complete a survey and incorporate a question asking them to rate the business/service/product from one to five stars. Then only invite those respondents that rate the business five stars to post a review [almost always to Google].
• ask customers to post a review to one of the independent sites and then only ask those that have written a five-star review there to copy it to Google.
• via an app.  You will have seen this one when you install some apps: you are asked to rate [the app] and if you score it less than five stars you will be directed to send a message as to why you did so to the business (you won't be asked to rate it publicly). Only those that give a five star rating will be asked to post a publicly visible review.

How can you spot them?

You cannot. Not unless you are part of the process - you have used the business in question and had your review filtered - or you know someone who is or has been (ex-members of staff are often a good source). Fortunately, this kind of activity invariably leaves an obvious and impossible to disguise paper-trail for the regulators to find.

The 'blitzers'

It's surprising just how many businesses do this, often in combination with one or both of the two actions described above. They accumulate email addresses over a period and then they make a single concerted effort. And that's fine unless that effort includes selection and/or filtering, which it invariably does.

How can you spot them? 

So easy: no - or few - reviews for a period then a slew, for no apparent reason.

Can an honest business hope to compete?

All of the above makes life extremely frustrating for honest businesses. But please don't succumb to 'if we can't beat them...' because you can, legally and legitimately and you won't have to wait until the regulators get round to sanctioning them. In these two ways...

• the first thing to do is institute a planned review management strategy for your business - detailed advice on this will be covered in Chapter 10
• next, take any competitor business where you have suspicions of malpractice and keep a very close eye on them. Speak to past members of their staff if and when you have the opportunity (it is astonishing how some businesses so easily forget staff mobility when encouraging law-breaking). Once you are sure they are in breach you can then at least explain to your customers why 'so and so' look so good when they ask.

Your medium to long term strategy should be to look as good as, if not better, than your competitors irrespective of whatever they may do. Like this:

CMA compliance - just when we thought we had seen it all!

HelpHound has been at the forefront of review management for so long now, we thought we had seen every way in which a business might seek to 'game' the system (for 'game the system' read 'break the law', for that is exactly what they are doing).

Just to put everyone in the picture, and before we go on to describe this new shocker, let's catch up with the common compliance breaches every regular reader will be familiar with...

Cherry-picking

By far the most common transgression, almost every business we meet with is - or has been - guilty of this to some extent or another (that doesn't make it any more legitimate - or legal): it involves asking selected customers to post a review - and it's in contravention of the CMA core rules - if a business asks one customer to write a review, anywhere, it must enable all its customers to do so.

Gating

Gating takes many forms, but all have the same effect: they give consumers a skewed picture of the business. How? The business in question invites all its customers to write a review (so far so compliant) - which could be to their website or to a little-known (and little seen) reviews site - and then asks only those who write five star reviews to post them to a site that really matters - commonly Google. We probably don't need to tell you that this is contrary to CMA regulations - but we have several examples on file here at HelpHound.

The new kid on the block

This latest example has taken both the above and added a whole new layer of non-compliance. We have not given it a name because it so shockingly contravenes all regulations, Google T&Cs, the CMA rules and the common law that we don't want to trivialise it by doing so.

It involves doing all of the above and then posting the review to Google 'on behalf of the consumer' - by opening a new Google account in the customer's name and then posting the review that has been sent in by email or posted elsewhere. 


Further reading...

• The CMA regulations - and our explanation
• Cherry-picking - a full definition
• Review Gating - in the context of other rule breaches

Google ban Review Gating. Hooray!

  The recent important change to Google's content policy

For years now we have sometimes been frustrated by our inability to convince some businesses that gaming Google was a bad idea. Read the 'Introduction' below and then we will go into some detail on 'Gating' and the other mechanisms both businesses - and some reviews sites - use to bend (more often break) the UK CMA rules and Google's terms of service to their advantage.

Introduction

Reviews exist for one purpose - and one purpose only - to assist consumers when it comes to making an informed choice as to which business or service to buy or use. 

The expression 'informed choice' is critically important here: for reviews to be effective they must be trustworthy, not 'a bit trustworthy' or 'mostly trustworthy' - just trustworthy. That does not mean to say that every reviews system must be perfect, but to deliver it must do its very best to ensure...

• accuracy - the reviewer should only review a business or product they have personal first-hand experience of
• transparency - anyone should be able to post a review at a time of their own choosing
• lack of bias - the reviews system should not favour the business or product being reviewed

and there are rules in place to enforce that, the UK CMA regulations (again!) and now Google have added anti-gating to their term of service.

Why? And what were/are they doing?

Service businesses (as opposed to online retailers - which can live with a Google score as low as 4 out of 5 stars*) realised some time go that just one well-written Google review had - and increasingly has - the ability to 'stop the phones ringing'. Often they then adopted one of the following four strategies described below...

*while a score of 4 out of 5 may look alright, even good - at first glance - it will deflect customers from making contact with service businesses. Why? Because a business scoring that 4.0 with 100 reviews will have up to 20 one star reviews, and those will be read by prospective customers, and will put a significant number off taking the next step: contacting the business.

1.  Denial

  

Here's a typical local search - the kind most people seeking a business make every time. What have the three business's listed in the Google knowledge panel (the holy grail of SEO) done to say 'come to us, we're great at what we do'? Little or nothing - classic cases of 'Denial'.

Denial was definitely the simplest solution - and was adopted, consciously or unconsciously, by many. It involves ignoring Google reviews altogether. They just did not engage - and hoped that their customers would not write [negative] reviews to Google.

   No reviews until three months ago and then...a Google score of 1.0 (and failing the Google filter). Not helped by the fact that the review is written by a Local Guide (their reviews are given more weight, both by Google and by users)

Consequences: Initially - no Google reviews to encourage those searching for a 'consumer qualified' business to click through a search to that business. Ultimately - two things: first, the business's first review is highly likely to be a negative one (simply because human nature dictates that a dissatisfied customer has so much more motivation to write a review), starting their Google score at 1.0 out of 5, second: the business will increasingly stand out against its 'engaged' competitors, some of whom will be doing 2, 3 or 4 below.

2.  Cherry-picking

This (score and number of reviews) is, of itself, no proof of cherry-picking. But when you know the business and its staff, both current and previous, its competitors and ultimately the regulators (especially if a complaint is made) take an interest, and then combine this with the pattern of reviews, then there is cause for concern.

This is the next obvious step on from denial (and by far the most popular - especially when the business has received a negative review and is in 'panic mode'): simply ask only proven 'happy' customers to write reviews.

Consequences: Initially: the business looks great - of course it does. But this practice was outlawed by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in 2015. Read their regulations - which apply to all UK businesses - here.

3.  Independent reviews sites

Use an independent reviews site that offers some kind of filtering mechanism, either restricting consumers' ability to write a review: allowing the business to determine to whom and when the review invitation is sent/locking out anyone else or incorporating a mechanism that would lessen the impact of that negative review: allowing the business to challenge it and then insisting on 'proof of purchase' before publishing the review - forcing the [negative] reviews down the reviews timeline (who reads page 2?). 

Consequences: this drives disgruntled customers to post to a site that does allow them to post a negative review, a syndrome that we call 'Deflection' (a 'must read'). Which site? Maybe Yelp, maybe TripAdvisor (in the case of hospitality) but the overwhelming site of choice in 2018? Google. This results in the business looking good on the reviews site but much less good on Google - in other words, it is not only contravening the regulations, it is also backfiring on the business in the worst possible way.

4.  Gating

Put simply: use a mechanism to establish which of the businesses customers' were most likely to write a 5* review and then invite all of that subset to post a review to Google. Very common with apps, where good reviews scores are everything, and increasingly common with all other kinds of business.

When a business has few reviews (with mixed results) on Google for an extended period, but many on another reviews site and then suddenly acquires a flood of great Google reviews, it raises suspicions of gating. We have obscured anything that could identify the business in question because that would be unfair, but it would be easy for the regulators to conduct an audit and equally easy for Google to spot if such behaviour had been happening.

This is done in one of two ways...

• send out a private email survey asking customers to report their experience to the business, then ask only those that respond positively to write a review to Google

• use an [innocent] and relatively invisible - in terms of its Google profile - reviews site, gather all the reviews there and then only invite those that post a 5* review on the reviews site to copy that review to Google

Consequences: until now - few. If a competitor noticed then they might use that against the business: 'Of course their Google rating is excellent - you do know they are only inviting happy customers to post reviews?' - and also a form of cherry-picking (see 2 above).

an example of a TripAdvisor 'red flag'

Now: Google will delete the suspect reviews. And we don't know yet what other sanctions Google will apply (TripAdvisor and Yelp 'red flag' businesses in similar circumstances) but it is possible that Google will deem that all the reviews of the business in question - and their vital reviews score - have been acquired by gating. 

   

One version of a Yelp 'red flag'

On top of this, gating contravenes the CMA regulations, which are expressly written to ensure consumers get a full and fair impression of the business in question.

In summary

We have a great deal of sympathy for businesses that have adopted one of the above means of protecting their reputations from what they, mostly quite justifiably, see as unwarranted or unfair attack on the most important platform on the web - Google, as long as they have done so in all innocence.

Some readers - certainly regular readers - may be surprised at this statement, but we can assure you that we meet such businesses on a daily basis. They genuinely did not know that they were doing anything wrong. And they certainly did not know that there was a solution that would achieve the following legitimately...

• great flows of independently moderated reviews to their own website
• onward flows of reviews to their Google listing - to show in all searches

Welcome to HelpHound.

Further reading

• The CMA rules - explained
• Deflection - the unintended consequence of employing an independent reviews site
• Why scoring 4 on Google is not enough - for high-value service businesses
• Cherry-picking - a detailed analysis
• How a single well-written negative review can seriously damage a business - a case history
• There's no need to break the rules - results like these are achieved without adopting any of the strategies outlined in 1-4 above
• The three simple reasons businesses join HelpHound

A sorry P.S.

We thought the world had moved on from this, but still some businesses persist in misnaming testimonials (selected customer opinions) as reviews...

...just to be absolutely clear, reviews, by definition, must be independently moderated, otherwise consumers are being misled. Some businesses are confused by the likes of...

...online retailers (John Lewis here) that host 'their own' reviews. In reality, of course, these reviews are not 'of John Lewis', they are 'of the product', manufactured by someone else (and in reality they are hugely helpful for the retailer - as well as the consumer - which will simply drop any line that scores badly).