It has been almost 2 months since my last post. I think the following will more than make up for the lapse of activity.

On March 9th, at 4:09pm, a client of mine received a phone call from Barbara Gallant of the Charlotte Better Business Bureau.  This call came in through the number I use to track and record phone calls generated by my client’s Google Adwords campaign. Below is a screenshot of my Marchex control panel showing this data.  (My client’s info has been blurred to protect his privacy.)

Barbara explained that the reason she called was because there had been phone inquiries to the Charlotte BBB about my client’s business.  While listening to this the first time, I immediately became suspicious.  Why had she dialed the number that is only displayed when someone clicks through to his site via a PPC ad?  I decided to check the click referrer information to see if any of his ads had been clicked around the time of this phone call.  Here is a screenshot of that information:

As you can see, exactly 2 minutes before the phone call from Barbara, someone came to the website via a Google query of “landscaper charlotte nc”.  This made me even more suspicious. So I decided to delve into the Google Analytics data, and see if I could isolate this one click.  For the entire day of March 9th, there was only one referrer from Google that had the term “landscaper” in it.  I logged into Google Analytics, filtered the date range for 3/9/2009 only, selected “Traffic Sources”, and then clicked on “Google (cpc).”   Sure enough, Analytics had tracked 1 visit from the “landscaper” keyword which is shown below:

The data shows that the visitor who clicked the ad from the “landscaper charlotte nc” query spent over 10 minutes on the website, and viewed 5 pages.  To be certain, I clicked on the landscaper instance and cross referenced it with the landing page.  The screenshot of that data is here:

 

 

 

The landing page was tracked as the destination url I have set in the landscaping ad group. Notice the “?_vsrefdom=go..” appended to the html file?  That’s the variable a piece of javascript on the site checks for in a referrer.  If it’s present, the javascript snippet will change all the phone numbers on the website to the tracking phone number which records the phone call!

I find it interesting that the Adwords ad was clicked at 4:07pm, the call came in at 4:09pm, the phone call lasted 8 minutes and 32 seconds, and the website visit lasted 10 minutes and 18 seconds.   That pretty much proves that Barbara closed the website when she hung up the phone with my client.

As I stated earlier, I omitted parts of the phone call which identified my client.  When Barbara first called, she asked for my client by name.  At the end of the 1st recording I will share below, Barabara stated, “according to our records, the business start date was June 2001.”   Barbara implied that the Charlotte BBB had a record of this business, and that she wanted to verify the information she “had” was correct.  It is important for you to know that my client’s name and the date he started his business is located on the “About Us” page.  Therefore we need to see what pages the person who clicked the “landscaper charlotte nc” ad at 4:07pm looked at.  We accomplish this by requesting a navigation summary of the entrance path of that landing page in the content drilldown.  Here is a screenshot of that data:

As you can see, one of the paid clicks that landed on this page visited the “About Us” page.  I think it is quite obvious that Barbara lied about everything she told my client.  There were no phone calls about my client. She didn’t even know about my client UNTIL she clicked on his Google ad, mined his site for information about him, and then called him via the paid click tracking number.

With that said, here is the first part of that recorded phone call. Barbara from the Charlotte BBB explains that she is calling because there had been many phone inquiries about my client:
charlotte-bbb-part1

Here is the second part where she talks about the “active referral service” and explains how my client can turn his business into a billboard for the Charlotte BBB:
charlotte-bbb-part2

It gets better! I actually called Barbara back at the Charlotte BBB, and asked her about all the calls my client had gotten to see if she would continue her lie and try to scam me as well. Boy, did she ever:
charlotte-bbb-david-calls

Here is Barbara telling me that the Charlotte BBB makes sure business’ are ethical and honest (even though they aren’t themselves):
charlotte-bbb-ethical1

Here is Barbara telling me that the Charlotte BBB has “standards” and that they set the standard for ethical and honest business practices. LOLZ!:
charlotte-bbb-ethical2

 It upsets me that the Charlotte BBB is out there making reports of business scams, when they are a scam themselves. The way they lied to my client and myself is positive proof of their “hustler” type mentality.  It’s clear they try to recruit Charlotte business owners by seeing who is advertising on the internet.  It’s very clear this is how Barbara Gallant made contact with my client.  I wonder how many other ads she clicked that day, or for the past month even.  How much has the Charlotte BBB cost Charlotte business owners in fraudulent clicks?  How many have they tricked into paying $350 because they were told “people were making inquiries about their business?”

I will gladly allow any Google certified professional in Charlotte NC to verify the above data if they are interested.

Filed under: Charlotte, Charlotte BBB

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