First-party reviews are reviews that are collected and displayed on your own website and you own the review. In comparison, third-party reviews are those collected on third-party websites, such as Google, Facebook and TripAdvisor, which are independent of your business.
First-party reviews allow you to add product or service Schema markup to your page to enable the star ratings in Google results, as seen in the image below. This can have a significant impact on your click-through rate and help you drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Important note: The star ratings need to be for a product rather than a business, Google will not show these for your home page.
While both first-party and third-party reviews offer valuable insights to customers, having first-party reviews allows you deeper insights.
You are able to compare reviews between your products and identify strengths and weaknesses at the micro level, improving the overall performance of your business.
An example of this is a cruise operator that was able to see, via his first-party reviews, that one of his cruises was performing much better than the same cruise at a different time. Using the first-party reviews the operator was able to see immediately what cruise was underperforming and discover, quickly, what the problem was (in this situation the cause of the problem was the difference in the commentary of the two captains).
The majority of operators put a lot of effort into collecting third-party reviews and miss the benefits of owning first-party reviews. Using a system like Yonder HQ, operators are able to solve both problems, first asking for first-party reviews before then asking guests to kindly leave a third-party review.
First-party reviews are a powerful tool available to tour operators to improve organic search performance, build trust and ultimately boost your bottom line.
