Yodle

The initial sales caller was very enthusiastic and convincing. The promised to set up a state of the art website for my geographical farm, include an IDX feed capability, boost it's presence on many platforms through SEO, social media campaign, and client reviews. I performed each of the assigned tasks they asked me to do and their user interface said that my portion of responsibilities met was exceptional.
* YET, in reality the website they assigned to me was not targeted to my geographical farm as i had requested
* The website was amateurish and exceedingly anemic by 2015 internet standards, it was very rigidly structured with very little flexibility to personalize, it was aesthetically and functionally unappealing and useless, and they DID NOT allow me to have a direct IDX feed as I had required.
* The social media platform claims and promises, actually never materialized in my Social media pages. They promised to post regular engaging content and the reality was it never amounted to anything productive or useful and it never gained any interest from consumers.
* They promised an easy templated farm direct contact tool system which never materialized.
* My initial complaints were met with resistance and inflexibility to the point that I asked for a cancellation and refund and they refused to let me out of the EXPENSIVE 6 month commitment( First warning sign). There was a massive down payment for the program (this should have been my second warning sign).
* The client reviews were useful however, beyond my own use of them in my own publishing to my social media campaign those reviews had almost NO exposure to the general public in my market area.
* Since I finished my commitment to them all the reviews have disappeared and are either no longer searchable or they are so well hidden by the search engines that they are worthless.
* I got one business lead in the 6 month commitment that turned out to be a wrong contact for the person so i suspect it was a bogus artificial lead anyhow

Every step of the way, the yodel team was professional and gave proper support and customer service. The only issue was on the front and with Jimmy. He was quite a professional and gave me a outstanding presentation. Having been through SCO for years, I shared with him that our business is "mystery shopping "– not private investigation. He assured me that your little could get me ranked for that specific service and that overtime15 or more other search terms would pop up. He even showed me a yodel website in Arizona for mystery shopping. I repeatedly tried to break down any gaps in his promisethat mystery shopping could be supported through a yodel website.he overcame my objection I went with the program. I do believe your service is perfect for the bricks and mortar local businesses. Your sales team can save a lot of time and money not overselling businesslike ours that will not benefit from you. I especially like how in a previous coin month ago the customer service girl was in power to change our website from Allstar customer service.com to Dallas mystery shopping company.com – a more keyword rich domain name. I also want to get big big praises to Sheila who handled my request professionally and explainedeverything thoroughly. She gave it to me straight that it is not a good fit and that saved me from being a departing customer that is very happy – 21 that would've been very upset. Sheila is awesome to work with and enjoysher job, has a command of the business aspects of your program and give great customer service. I'm very impressed that she called me to tell me my refund was coming through. Thank you

I have to join with the others who were woefully disappointed and wished they could cancel their contract. When you enroll in their program, you must sign a 3-month contract. If their performance is poor, they will NOT let you out early.

When I talked to their sales rep, I liked the concept: their computer algorithm will optimize the bid position and amount and even search engine for your internet cost per click advertising. I understood that Yodle would mark up each click, but the rep assured me that the efficiency of their system would still result in cost savings. When I was talking to the sales rep, I asked what the mark-up was, but he said it was too complicated to figure out. That should have been a warning. I was thinking they would charge a 10 to 20% mark-up, not a 400% to 500% markup.

In my case, I started with $1,000 per month, which was about 1/5 my normal budget. Because Yodle was to supplant my own AdWords, Yahoo and MSN efforts, I felt a little nervous about underfunding the program and so voluntarily increased the first month's budget to $3,000. My average cost per click went from $0.81 when I managed it myself, to about $4.00 under Yodle. I then lowered my commitment to the contractually required $1,000 my second month. The second month saw minimal improvement in efficiency, to about $3.75.

I tried to cancel but they would not let me out. They said they had the 3-month contract so that their algorithm had an opportunity to optimize the ideal position and search engine. I retorted that I had already spent $4,000, which was $1,000 more than the contract called for, and that their computer should learn by the number of clicks rather than by time, but to no avail.

The one nice thing I can say is that the advertising rep (different from the sales rep) with whom I worked was very nice and did try her best to get results. However, the results were just atrocious. I learned, to my dismay, just how many of my existing customers look up my contact information through cost per click... at $4 per call, this was quite annoying. And like the others in this review, I got calls from those trying to sell me things and those looking for a job.

All in all, Yodle was a very poor business choice for me and I cannot recommend them to anyone.

We began working with Yodle back in 2009 and they literally put us ON THE MAP. We doubled in business 2 years in a row which was awesome. We had plans to stick with them through our company's expansion so that we could grow with them. But beginning in 2012 they just FELL OFF on us. They kept switching our account representatives so it was like starting and restarting from ground zero! I called them once because we were beginning to have horrible success with them and it was around May and they informed me they still had our JANUARY SPECIALS running... meaning our account rep had no interest in keeping up with our PPC Ads. Then 2-3 months in a row we have ZERO calls and ZERO email (keep in mind we were paying $1,200/month for our DFW location and around $850/month for our Austin location). So as soon that happened I immediately cancelled our Austin advertising and had a few conversations with our account rep telling him that we would give them 1 MORE MONTH to prove their worth and that was only because of everything they did for us in the beginning. I ended up giving them 2 months ($2,400 worth of time) and NADA. All that happened was I got a call from our rep who had the audacity to ask us to RAISE our marketing budget per month. Of course this pissed me off and we cancelled everything with them and cut our ties. It was a major disappointment because I really did enjoy working with them in the beginning, but I guess after you are with them for so long they seem to just forget about you and let your money go to waste. At first I was recommending them to everyone... Now I probably wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy. Sucks that it went down so poorly.

I can't believe that I allowed Yodle to rob me of $5,000 of my hard earned money. Their sales team did a great job of selling me on their service, but as soon as I signed on the dotted line, the sales team disappeared. Then I was handed off to a bunch of flunky account managers. The first thing they did was educate me on how to promote the lowsy "adversite" that they whipped together for me in a few hours. Not only was the site rudimentary and not aesthetically pleasing, but also had a bunch of misinformation. Everything from the stock photos they used, to the language was bogus! When I requested that they change the photos and the verbiage, they never got back to me. I eventually had to re-write the content myself and email it to them. I even sent a new background image for the site, but they didn't even implement it. Then, the amount of work that they wanted me to do to promote their site was ridiculous. The whole reason why I hired Yodle was because I don't have time to do my own website marketing and prospecting. Little did I know that I was the marketing machine. To sum things up, all I got out of this during my 3 month campaign, was a bunch of phone calls from prospective customers who weren't even in my geographic area or from those looking for services that my company doesn't even provide. Just by chance, I thought I might bump into one solid lead from this, but that wasn't the case. After my 3-month campaign ended, I didn't realize that I had to cancel the automatically renewing contract in writing, and it went on for another 2 months. It wasn't until I reconciled my credit card statement that I realized they were still charging me. When I brought this to their attention and requested a refund for the extra 2 months, they ran me around for 2 weeks before telling me NO. Do yourself a favor and hire a small web development company or freelancer that comes recommended to you from an associate.