Birdeye vs. Whitespark Local Citation Finder

For businesses that have customers or clients or patients with several different locations, Birdeye is essential to help with the reviews and messages received through Google and other platforms. For businesses with only 1 single location, Birdeye could still be useful but wouldn't be as essential as it would be for other businesses.

We have a client base within our organization of about ~5,000, so it can be difficult to keep track of all of their marketing status/standings. The Whitespark Local Citation Finder removes the aspect of human error and ensures that we are providing fast, reliable results for thousands of our clients. Being able to see our competitor's citation summary is a large advantage, not other products such as this provides.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is always very helpful and ready to give you the personal attention that you require.
• They connect many different sources and funnel them straight to you so you can easily capitalize on multiple platforms and information streams.
• They are constantly innovating and improving their systems with real-time feedback from their customers.

Incentivized

• The information within the finder is very accurate, which eliminates us having to dig through the internet for citations.
• The reports are automated for you, so there's no extra work on the user's end.

Incentivized

• The sentiment feature is just okay. It requires custom adjustments and time to understand where it is working well and where it is not in order to get the most out of it, while other features require very little user input.
• Social listening needs work. I often receive notifications for unrelated terms because of their similarity in spelling to my organization's name, so I don't use this feature.
• Birdeye could have more built-in features to create digital content from the reviews.
• Birdeye could also have additional reputation tools to strengthen GMB listings and to combat negative press. Review listings and rich snippets in search are great, but having a tool that measures and helps to improve overall brand health/search results would be amazing. My CEO isn’t looking at what is going right. He looks at what is going wrong. We may have thousands of positive reviews on Google, but the bad article with false information is still showing up on page one of search results. That makes for an unhappy CEO.

Incentivized

• One small improvement I'd recommend is creating the ability to connect to 3rd party platforms, such as Google Data Studio

Incentivized

I think it is a good tool overall, there are some hiccups but what program doesn't have them. I think we should be notified of more things, specifically broken integrations. There have been instances where I don't notice for MONTHS a client it's having requests sent out because they are organically still getting reviews.

Incentivized

I think it is very easy to figure out very quickly by just playing around in the dashboard. If you have a question you can reach out to our contacts and they do a very good job of figuring out if or what is the problem and getting back to us fast.

Support is really responsive for the most part. I don't feel like they explain it the best for people who aren't as tech-savvy. I have recently had trouble with a more difficult integration and it is hard to pinpoint who I need to reach out to.

Incentivized

Let Birdeye do what they do

Incentivized

Our choice of reputation management platform came down to two contenders, Birdeye and Listen360. Ultimately we chose Birdeye because of their ethical review gathering process. Listen360 had review-gating built in as part of their process, which is against Google's terms of service. We wanted to be very careful to gather reviews in an ethical way, and Birdeye was better for our needs.

Incentivized

We have used BrightLocal in the past, which was a great platform. The biggest difference between Whitespark and BrightLocal is its usability. BrightLocal can be difficult to navigate, while Whitespark is much more straightforward and easily navigatable. Within our large organization, we also use the Whitespark Rank Tracker, so being able to utilize multiple Whitespark products streamlines a lot of our processes.

Incentivized

• SEO has increased due to online rep increasing
• Review count has come up significantly due to having a platform that helps
• The system puts reviews and where they are coming from into perspective to try and obtain more in other ways

Incentivized

• The positive ROI has been seen through our client's renewal %. Since we are able to provide accurate reporting, they trust the work that is presented to them more than not.

Incentivized