Reach Local Reaches Blacklist Status

November, 2007

The purpose of this page is to warn others and recommend that you avoid entering into any agreement with this company.  We are a highly dissatisfied customer. We have expressed our disaffection with their service and have requested that our unspent advertising funds be refunded. They have refused, thereby forcing us honor a contract where, on our opinion, they win and we lose. They don't seem to care.  Be believe that they prefer to take the money and run.  We believe that Reach Local's ( or reachlocal.com ) customer satisfaction and customer service deficiencies outweigh any technical expertise they have.

• Our own ad-word campaign has created as much traffic as theirs at one third of the cost based. This is based on Cost Per Click.  And bringing down the CPC is one of their primary claims.

• We find they are better at coding than marketing.  Based on our experience, we do not buy their claims of being experts in internet marketing. Internet perhaps. Marketing: no.

• We find their response and execution time to be painfully slow.

• Their system does not allow for easily testing of different headlines and ad copy and measuring their varying effectiveness.  In fact, they neglected to consult with our marketing people on copy or previously established or on negative keywords that would avoid valueless traffic.

• They claim that their system gets smarter as it progresses. That may be. But we are an unhappy customer because their CPC rate was so much higher than our previous campaign that it would be impossible for us to recoup our investment in their process until it was 400% better for a number of months.  That seems unlikely.

• They have a technically impressive system for recording phone calls that result from their ad placements.  Few of the phone calls recorded had any value to us as they did an inadequate job of working with negative keywords to filter out unqualified callers.   And why should they improve? They got to take our money regardless of the quality of traffic.

• Their system has broken down sending our potential hits to a Reach Local error page.  They offered an apology but no refund for misdirected hits.

• They have burned their bridge with our company. While they don't seem to care. You might.

If you're considering a career move to this organization, ask yourself about the security you'll have working for a company with such careless disregard for their customers.  If you're considering selling their service, consider what will it do to your ability to ever sell anything to those same customers again. We are told that franchisees of WSI offer their same service.  Buyer beware!

Our grievance is with Reach Local of Woodland Hills, CA 91367

Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.