Yodle promises to advertise your law firm or business on Google, Yahoo!, and other sites, and build you a website that will get clients to call. They also promise to gather detailed information about your site visitors and callers to both help screen out low-quality from high-quality online leads, as well as to optimize their online ad campaigns to improve the traffic to your site.
But what Yodle actually does, as far as I can tell, is employ a bunch of jerks to call me (four times last week, plus an email for good measure), insult me, and try to bully me into becoming a client. Judging by the buzz on several email lists, my experience is typical.
Yodle’s hard-sell tactics do not inspire confidence. Nor does this listing they created for Chicago lawyer Barry Kreisler (trust me, you’ll love this):
I know for a fact that Barry does not offer HVAC, plumbing, or male waxing services at his law office. Quality control is obviously not Job One at Yodle. (Yodle also lists bankruptcy lawyers under the “bankruptcy lawy” category in their directory.)
Yodle will not be getting my business. I have my own website, and Google AdWords is simple enough to use on my own. Plus, my law blog drives over 1,500 potential clients to my website every month. I can track my own potential client contacts—and I do—using good old pen and paper. In comparison, Yodle offers negligible value, but a huge price tag.
Edit: Whoa, Yodle records incoming phone calls. Attorney-client privilege problems, anyone?
Update: Yodle has issued a challenge to prove its worth! Follow the Yodle Challenge and see whether it does.
Sam Glover is a business and consumer rights lawyer and the creator of Lawyerist.
Lawyerist is the #1 law practice blog. We write about marketing, practice management, career development, and more.
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Thank you for your post on this matter. Your feedback is valuable to us.
Yodle is the fastest growing company in the local online advertising space, which is itself one of the fastest growing online segments. As a leader in this space, we are extremely proud of our service and team of intelligent online marketing representatives that are focused on educating local businesses about getting new customers from the web. This concept is very new and often times complex to understand given the number of options in the market place. Our service is completely transparent and our contract length is minimal, so to be anything but upfront would not only be irresponsible, it would be bad business practice. From customer #1 to now over 5,000, Yodle’s mantra is “Customers Rule”. Each of our over 300 employees lives and breathes this every day.
As for the error mentioned above, this is not acceptable and was corrected several months ago. While it was in fact a bug on our own directory (local.yodle.com), it was made while it was in beta (test) mode with very few visitors. YodleLocal has since been GA (generally accessible) and is helping hundreds of thousands of individuals connect with local businesses searching for services.
Thank you again for your feedback. To discuss any matter with me directly, please email info@yodle.com. Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle.
Twice your sales staff pretended to be from Google, and only admitted they were calling from Yodle when I specifically asked.
As for the errors, neither was fixed when I looked several days ago, although it looks like you have finally pulled the lawyer specialty categories entirely.
Court-
I gotta say, I was with Sam when one of your sales people called him last week. The salesman initially indicated he was a consultant for Google, then after Sam directly asked him twice who he worked for, he eventually said “Yodle”.
The most interesting part — to me — was that this phone call came an hour *after* Sam told me he was going to write this post because of all the hard-sales calls he had been getting.
While your customers may “rule”, I think your employees’ attitudes toward *potential* customers could use some work.
I just got off the phone with Mike DeLuca, Yodle’s sales & marketing VP. Nice guy. He says the deceptive salesperson Aaron and I heard from was dealt with “swiftly and rather harshly,” and that they will be instituting some ethics policies going forward. Definitely good to hear.
Regarding the phone call recording issue, Mike said they have faced similar concerns with doctors, and customers may prevent anyone but themselves from listening to the recordings, or shut off recording entirely. I said he might want to disclose this up front–to lawyers, anyway–and he agreed that sounded like a good idea. Good to know.
Sam, thanks for the opportunity to speak with you and I appreciate the update you’ve provided here. We are striving to help folks like yourself find creative and effective ways to advertise their Practice. The legal vertical is one of our top categories and we are currently helping hundreds of lawyers across the country target and find the types of cases they want to work on. Just as in Law, our reputation means everything and we will continue to pursue excellence for all of the clients we serve. Thank you for your criticism as it gives us an opportunity to improve.
Mike DeLuca
SVP Sales & Marketing
mdeluca@yodle.com
Yodle has lied to my staff , trying to leave a message for me to return. thanks for the ‘head’s up’ about these folks.
Yodle may be good for some folks, but it is a hard sell to me because after almost 3 months I have received zero leads. ( i don’t count the marketers and out of area calls that I paid for ) I have not made a penny but this far have paid in over $1,000.
After expressing my concerns to the folks at Yodle, they tried to convince me that they should provide the web site. They did it for free so I said OK, what ever it takes. ( we used my web site to start out because I felt there was nothing wrong with it. ) Well that did not work either and now a third try of doing something different is in the works. The end of August marks the end of my 3 month contract. I have allowed them to do what they thought was needed to make this work but they are still firing blanks at my expense.
I am a Yodle customer and these are the facts. They should stop promising things that they can’t deliver. I am still waiting for something good to come out of this. Maybe a refund of some sort Mr. DeLuka?
How can cancel a contract with these guys?
My experience with this so called company is this. I have had my website goprolandscaping.com for a few years now, these guys come in and set up goprolandscaping.net charge me a large amount of money for it and than charge me for leads off of it. Which I didn’t receive any till I called to complain, they were actually drawing business from my goprolandscaping.com domain to feed their domain with links to their 1-800 # and their site yodle.com, then charging me almost $100 per lead. They also copied without approval all materials on my website at goprolandscaping.com to the goprolandscaping.net they had set up, again I’ll say without mine or my web designer’s permission. Then they added their phone number instead of mine. I did get them to transfer the domain to my current service where goprolandscaping.com is set up. To me it’s just plain stealing, down low dirty stealing. You have a website created, a business name and you work hard and some so called company comes in and piggy backs off of all of your hard work. I’m looking into legal action right now and so is my web designer, it appears Yodle is interested in some other clients she is working with, since they have been all over the other clients sites. BEWARE OF THIS COMPANY YODLE, YODLE.COM, very scary group, not here to help you at all, here to steal from you and piggy back off of what you have worked so hard to set up and then charge you high fees for doing nothing, but using what you already had set up. NOTHING BUT THIEVES, INTERNET THIEVES and liars. Not to mention again the copying of all the material on my website, they had an exact match to my site at goprolandscaping.com Doesn’t make me happy at all! PLEASE BEWARE OF THIS COMPANY YODLE, YODLE.COM
Michael Harris
GoPro Landscaping
Knoxville, TN
Yodle’s Disclaimer off thier Invoice SAYS IT ALL!
Legal Disclaimer
Yodle is not liable for any disruptions in service, inadequate service or otherwise undesirable performance. The customer understands and acknowledges that business specific characteristics may result in performance that is above or below similar clients. The customer understands that any claim or guarantee provided, exclusively pertains to services directly rendered by the vendor, and not to 3rd party traffic provider costs. Yodle makes no claim as to the merchantability of this offering, and is not liable for any damages, monetary or otherwise, incurred by the customer. You may not lower your budget until your recurring advertising budget commitment period has passed. After your contract commitment has passed, you will be billed on a monthly recurring basis and you may cancel at any time. All cancellations must be made by fax and will be made effective on the following bill cycle at which time any remaining funds will be used for final advertising. The customer understands and acknowledges that the products listed above carry no express or written warranty. The customer understands that this Order Form is in addition to and part of the Customer Terms and Conditions, collectively the “Agreement” and by signing above, acknowledges he/she has reviewed this Agreement.
It looks like Yodle’s lawyers need to read my post on writing clearly. That whole paragraph could be written in a few short sentences:
I think it is odd that they put the “additional terms” below the signature line, instead of above it. You don’t sign a contract before the terms, after all.
Well, here is an update from my earlier post regarding Yodel. September 10th marked the end of my 3 month contract with Yodel. The marketers keep calling me using the Yodel phone number assigned to my account, ( which Yodel counts as a lead ) and a lot of tire kickers. The tally of business gained from using Yodel: 2 small jobs totalling $350.00. How is that for a $1500.00 +investment?
I can’t really complain about the customer service as they did reply to my concerns, but then they really did not do anything to make things better. They did put up handiman.net website for free, but to no avail. ( I had my own website but they stated that it would help if they designed the website) Made no difference at all.
They even refunded some money too.
Again, just another bad decison that I have learned from. Watch out for those promising sales guys at Yodel. Good pitch, poor performance.
Is there anybody out there in the handyman business that has used Yodel with sucess? I would like to hear from them.
Until I find some rock solid company that delivers results, I will keep using Craig’s list to post my ads. It’s free and at least I get a lot of jobs. Goodbye Yodel and good luck!
Just one more important thing that I should mention.
Yodle raves about how they track leads from your website and how you can also log in and monitor the progress. All true, but one big important item they don’t let you monitor is your account balance and how much you are spending per lead. Hmmmm, no wonder I did not have any balance at the end of my contract. I asked them what about my account balance? They keep it.
So I just wonder how much of my budget was used on my behalf, really.
how do i get out of a yodle contract?
Be nice if they actually posted that Fax number somewhere.
What I find amazing is that Yodle charges upwards of $500 for what I now get from a company like Adoozle for $199 or less. Yodle did nothing for me over 6 months. They are not the leader in local search marketing; they just raised enough money to swim for awhile until they drown.
Let’s see…Yodle offers PPC reporting that gives you no indication of where your money is going, what you are bidding on (outside of the top ten keywords) or even what networks are utilized. They also fail to tell you how much of your bill is administrative and how much is being utilized for spend. It’s a scam. I was called in by one of their clients to consult and after viewing their “proprietary reporting” and speaking with their rank novice rep, I can honestly tell you that you might be better off throwing your money out the window.
But it doesn’t end there. This a company who has recently become infamous in the NYC SEM community for putting out job postings during the current recession with absolutely no intention to hire anyone. One of their recent ads ran for 3 months straight. Is that something a responsible company does to desperate job-seekers? Methinks not. If they do hire someone, it will be an untrained novice with no experience in the business much like the rep I encountered.
But oh no, it doesn’t end there. They also like to create and own dot-net or .biz mirror sites and move their client’s campaigns through them, virtually guaranteeing themselves the client’s future business for all eternity. If the client wants to switch management, they lose the campaigns and the mirror sites. Yodle does this to track phone leads, but the convenient byproduct is that they have an iron fisted grip over their clients because there is no possibility of seamless transitioning.
They are scam artists, plain and simple.
I will let Yodle address Alan’s comments, if it chooses, except for the last point. Yodle was very clear that Brea could take her .net domain and website with her whether she stayed with Yodle or not.
I’m more than willing to take my lumps when it is deserved. In the case of the comment above, i owe it to my company and our hard working employees to set the record straight.
I think the results of the Yodle Challenge speak to the value we provide to thousands of our customers. Not all customers are always going to be happy but we go to great lengths to set up the right campaigns, design the best websites and provide the best CS in the industry in order to give our clients the highest probability of success.
Not sure what is wrong with posting our job openings. We have hired over 100 people in 2009 in the face of the worst recession in 80 years. Yodle grew 700% YoY last year and will grow another 300% this year. To support that growth, you need people! Why on earth would we post jobs we had no intention of hiring for? I don’t get it but i assure you every job posting out there is completely legitimate and quite frankly, we have better things to do.
Sam, thanks for addressing the last point.
Once again, if anyone who reads this blog would like to bring any concerns directly to me, i am not above leaving my name, contact info and backlink. Thanks
Mike DeLuca
SVP Sales & Marketing
info@yodle.com
Been following this thread for a while. I think the point is, some may find the service works well, others may not get the results they hoped for, regardless, don’t mislead people into thinking you are something you are not…if that is what was done.
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