Hi and welcome to another episode of WebPunch’s School of Online Reputation Management. Again, I’m your host and teacher, Matt Jones, and today we’re going to tackle a pretty interesting topic. It’s how to gauge the return on your investment with Online Reputation Management.
I know many of you have Googled your ex-girlfriend, your ex-boyfriend. I know you’ve Googled the latest Star Wars trailer. I know you’ve Googled your favorite cat video, but how many of you have Googled your own business and how many of you know what your reputation currently is? There was a study that was done by MOZ and they wanted to find out if you have one negative article on that first page of search results, how much impact does that have on your business? They found that if there is 1 negative search result, then 21.9% of people wouldn’t do business with that company, 44.2% wouldn’t do business if there were 2 articles, negative articles on that first page. If there were 3 negative articles, 59.2% wouldn’t do business with them, and if there were 4 negative articles, 69.6% wouldn’t do business with that company.
So we thought it would be pretty interesting and we’re going to give MOZ credit for those stats and also Eric with BrandYourself who also helped us out a little bit with this formula. But we wanted to determine if you know what the percentage of average lost customers is, how can you extrapolate that and understand how that really impacts your business on the bottom line? So we wanted to determine Y, and Y in this case is the percentage of customers that you could have had. So how many customers could you have had if you didn’t have that negative search result on that first page of results on Google?
So to determine that we’re going to give you a formula, and again, we got this formula from Eric at BrandYourself, so the formula is Y = X ÷ by (100 – X). So in this case, if you had one negative search article that showed up when people are looking for you, it would be Y = 21.9 (again, we’re getting that from one negative search result). So Y = 21.9 ÷ (100 – 21.9) and that is 0.28 so that gives us the percentage more of customers that we could have had.
So let’s say that you get a hundred new customers. So in that case, we want to know how many missed clients we had, so in this case, C is our clients and missed customers is our clients x Y which is the percent of more customers we could have had. So in that case, if you had a hundred customers in a year and your Y is 0.28, you lost 28 customers in that given year. So that’s just by having that one negative search result. If each customer, let’s say, is giving you a hundred dollars in that given year, you lost $2,800 as a result of having one negative article on your search results page.
So we just want to point that out, that this stuff is really important and it really does make a difference to your business. Make sure you hire WebPunch because we can help you look great online and help you knock out your competition one review at a time.
