2 Questions: I recently found a landing page that was simply the Places page of the business. Is there any benefit at all in this approach. Secondly, what's Google doing to counteract fake negative reviews?
Not sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate more. Nothing, really as far as I know. It would be almost impossible for a bot to differentiate a fake review from a genuine one.
So instead of having an ad that goes to your website, it goes to the Google Places page for your business.
So the final sale takes place on google places or your website? If it is your website after people get to google places, then you may get lesser traffic to your site ie. funnelling effect.
I think that everybody should pay attention to the landing page because if it is bad designed and has poor content...your bounce rate will be near 100% and here is a question: for what reason you spent time and money???? so bot cant differ good and bad page but your customers can!
Consensus: Setting a Google Places page as a landing page; You might as well fly blind. You cannot track your Places page in Analytics and the Funneling effect would certainly impact your organic traffic.
Agreed not tracking your vistors is a big way to waste money. You should know if your advertising in a certain area is drawing in sales or potentional customers dont throw away advertising money.
No matter how good your ads is !!! A poor landing page will destroy all your traffic. With a ads is not enough to convert the traffic to sales and only one thing can convert those traffic which is landing page content. Google do track your landing page content with score as well . They will check your bounce rate and conversion rate.
I think you have got the answer for the first question. about second one, Google can't even do anything for the fake reviews as it allows users to give feed back on a particular, product, service or website. Its totally based on customers or visitors personal experience. So google can't even track if it is right or wrong. Some times it also happens that some people post fake positive reviews about themselves and these things are common in case of reviews.
Hey guys, I'm a sales rep for adwords express(basically adwords for places). And i've actually spoken to some clients who have gotten negative reviews removed, but it's the equivalent of getting a item from your credit rating removed(basically a huge headache). The only thing Google can do is track things like IP addresses, and user creation dates/comment times. If your a small local business like a restaurant or a mom and pop, the places page might be better especially if you have high reviews. As a customer, all the information you need is on the places page: location, store hours, reviews, and pictures. But a website is always good too