• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

Yelp and CDK Mayhem

Jun 29, 2011
60
19
First Name
Dave
I’ve always wondered why it our dealership was a paid Yelp advertiser even though we never were. My suspicions were that Yelp just said we were as a way to encourage our competitors to sign up or had a bill from them for advertising.

Flash forward to a few days ago. I logged into our business owners back-end tool on Yelp and noticed that I was not only administering my own Yelp page, but also a some Chevy dealer in Northern California. I left them a message thinking it was some glitch and logged back in yesterday. My list of dealers that I’m the administrator of had sprouted from my own and the Northern CA Chevy dealer to another VW dealer in Florida and a Texas Cadillac dealer.

I’m literally granted full powers to respond to their reviews, change their phone number, web site, upload new images, view their reporting, etc…I heard back from the CA Chevy dealer and they are able to log in as normal, but don’t see our dealership or any others. I wondered who out there was also granted with the ability to modify our Yelp listing.

I called Yelp and they told me that CDK had signed up a bunch of dealers with some advertising package back in Jan of 2015. I told them that was strange because we don’t any sort of reputation management services or marketing with them. At one point 2 years ago we tried their rep management 3 months, but it failed horribly.

She also said it’s weird because we have the advertising package from them, but we don’t have many of the benefits. All that’s essentially turned on is a block of competitor ads on our listing page.

We’re not receiving search placement or video benefits that come with the account. Yelp also said they are receiving a lot of calls about this problem and don’t fully understand what CDK has done to cause this.

I emailed CDK and have yet to hear back.

If you’re a Chevy or VW dealer you may want to be extra vigilant about your Yelp listing. Who knows what other problems might be around the corner.

Screen Shot 2015-06-05 at 12.46.04 AM.png
 
Oooh, I get to control 3 other dealerships that aren't mine too.

9pp8NnM.png
 
  • Like
Reactions: craigh
Here is the scoop I got from Yelp!

Some of our providers have back door access. Companies like CDK and Digital Air Strike. Yelp will do this from an Agency level as long as the company can prove the partnership between you (dealer) and company (cdk, digital airstrike).

It appears to Yelp that the error happened when an attached linked acct was trying to get removed. In turn it removed all profiles from all accounts. No one is really sure who is to blame for this one.

That's basically what i understood from the person I spoke with at Yelp. hope that helps some folks.
 
  • Like
Reactions: craigh
Dave, I recently tried to modify the listing info for a client's Yelp account, and found every field locked. When the client tried, same thing. After some digging, we found out that CDK was controlling the account, and it took him running it up the flag pole to some higher ups to get them to relinquish control to us.
 
This is Dan from Yelp. Hopefully I can clear things up for you. Unfortunately, we had to de-claim all listings that were associated with CDK and Digital Airstrike--which was not CDK or Digital Airstrike's fault. We're currently working with CDK and Digital Airstrike to restore access to these accounts. In the meantime, if you’d like to restore access to your listing directly you can email Yelp's support team. For CDK customers contact: ADPsupport@yelp. For Digital Airstrike customers contact: das-support@yelp. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience!