How many times have you clicked on a Google listing for some product review while researching your purchasing options only to find out that the review wasn’t a review at all, but rather a poorly-disguised attempt to convince you that their product, or a product the site is affiliate with, is the best thing since sliced bread?
This article teaches you how to recognize a biased review, and provides some examples of sites, including Associated Content, where you can find real, user-generated reviews by people who have no interest in selling you one way or the other. It will save you a lot of money this holiday season, and keep you from buying inferior products after reading hype passed off as help.
The first concept you’ll need to understand is “affiliate marketing”. Using affiliate networks like Linkshare, Commission Junction, Shareasale, and others, any website owner can get a commission when someone clicks from their website to another website and buys a product. Just because site A doesn’t actually stock and sell a product does not mean they aren’t being paid to get you in the mood to buy it. So how do you tell if a website is an affiliate of one of the products they review?
Remember, if the site is an affiliate with every product they are comparing, such as Comparethebrands.com, they get paid when you buy something. However, because they make money no matter WHICH product you end up buying, sites like these can afford to be unbiased. Let’s say, for instance, you are reading a review on bagless vacuum cleaners and links to all three of the vacuums send you to the product’s page on Walmart. They’re all about the same price, and they’re all from the same vendor. So it doesn’t matter which one you buy – thus allowing sites like this to be honest with the consumer.
On the other hand, let’s say you go to a site that uses affiliate links only on one product, and either doesn’t link to the others, or uses a normal link to them. Lo-and-behold, the link containing the affiliate code (we’ll teach you how to recognize this later) is the one they recommend. Who would have thought… Do a search for water filter reviews or diet pill reviews and you’ll quickly see a few examples.
So how do you recognize an affiliate link when you see one?
An affiliate link will typically have a long string of code in the URL. You might not see this after clicking on it because your browser will be redirected, but you can often see it by hovering over the link and looking in the lower-left corner of your browser. The following are not real links. They are used as examples only. If the link looks like this: http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=12345&u;=123456&m;=1234&urllink;=&afftrack;= or this http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=ABCD123&offerid;=123456.10000011&type;=3&subid;=0 or something similar with an “id” in the URL then it is an affiliate link. Often, however, websites will hide or “cloak” these links. You can usually tell when this is happening because the URL seen when hovering over the link ‘should’ take you to another page on that same website, yet you end up on a totally different website.
The second concept you’ll need to understand is the idea of presell landing pages. The water filter, diet pill, and exercise equipment industries have used such pages to their advantage for many years. Here’s what happens: You search for “compare water filters” or “water filter reviews” and end up on some page with a chart comparing all of the features of different brands. One is an obvious winner because it has way more features and costs less than the others. Again, lo-and-behold, that just happens to be the filter made by the company who owns the website, or the ONLY link on the page to contain affiliate code. For instance, notice that the link to Aquasana on the following page contains ?&discountcode;=… That little bit of code in the URL tells them where you came from so the site owner can collect a commission. Is it any wonder that particular water filter came out with the most features and one of the lowest prices? Do you think this page may have left off features, or cherry-picked features to show you from the other products http://www.waterfiltercomparisons.net/WaterFilter_Comparison.cfm ? This trick is particularly effective because it lets you “think” you made your own decision, when really the page was designed specifically to get you to buy the Aquasana water filter.
How Do You Know Who’s Being Honest?
We’ve already discussed one way, which is to pay attention to the URLs shown when you hover over links. Are they all affiliate links, or only the one that just happens to be recommended by the site owner? But the best way is to stick with sites that are known to be unbiased, and especially those that accept customer-generated reviews. If you really want to test the waters, write a bad review (only on a product with which you’ve had a bad experience) and submit to the comments section. If it gets published, you can trust the user reviews. If it doesn’t, the site owner is probably cherry-picking the user-generated reviews and only publishing the positive and neutral ones.
Here Are a Few Sites You Can Trust to Be Honest With You
The first and most obvious is right here on Associated Content. The reviews are written by people like you and me. But be sure to check and see what else the writer has written or reviewed to make sure this isn’t someone from the product/company writing a positive review. If they have reviewed other products, some positive, some negative, and have written about other things, chances are they are being honest with you. If this is the only thing they’ve published, or everything they publish is overly positive and/or from the same company, chances are they’re biased and using AC as a marketing venue. Another site, mentioned above, is Compare The Brands. They allow user generated reviews, positive and negative, and since all of the links are affiliate links they are not pressured to swing the vote one way or the other. One of the best places to get honest reviews online is Amazon.com. Although most of the reviews from staff tend to be positive, users often rage against a product. The system is automated and all comments (with the exception of those that violate the comment guidelines) are published.
If you’ve learned anything from this article, I hope it is to just be “aware”. Don’t blindly follow the advice of someone whom you have never met and who could easily have an interest in selling you on one product over another. The web is a great place to get information about products, and there is no shortage of honest review and comparison sites out there. The trick is to recognize which is which. I hope the tips above will help you shop online with more confidence.
