What a review funnel is, and what it must not do
Three moving parts, one of which is where nearly every compliance problem in this industry comes from.
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Review funnel, in one sentence
A review funnel is the path a business builds between a finished job and a published review, usually a short message, a landing page and the platform's own review form.
The name is borrowed from sales and it fits badly, because most of the drop off is not a failure of persuasion. It is friction. Somebody perfectly willing to leave a review still has to find the listing, find the button and be signed in, and each of those loses people.
A funnel has three parts. The ask, which is a message carrying a link. The landing page, which is a page you control. The handoff, which is the click through to the platform where the review is written and stored.
The landing page is the part with the compliance question attached, because it is the only step where a business decides what a given customer sees next. Everything contentious about review funnels happens on that one screen.
GetSetReply's funnel does not gate. Every customer who taps a face is shown the same public review links. A customer who taps OK or Poor also gets a private note form, which renders above those links rather than in place of them, so the public links are on the screen whatever was tapped.
Where a hundred asks actually go
Real funnels lose people at every step. These are plausible figures for a text message sent the day after a job, and the shape matters far more than the exact rates.
- Messages delivered
- 100
- Opened the landing page
- 38
- Tapped through to a review platform
- 19
- Actually published a review
- 11
Eleven reviews from a hundred asks is an 11 percent end to end conversion, and roughly 29 percent from landing page to published review. The largest single loss is between delivery and opening, which is a timing and wording problem rather than a funnel design problem.
Measure the final step separately from the rest. The platform handoff is where you lose people to a forgotten password, and that is fixed by pointing at a better link, not by rewriting your copy for the fourth time.
Why a funnel is worth building at all
A funnel is how a small business stops depending on luck. Reviews arrive on their own at a rate you do not control, and unprompted arrivals skew towards the two ends of the experience. Asking everybody is what fills in the middle and makes the rating representative of your actual customers.
It is also the cheapest thing described anywhere in this glossary. A message, a page and a link, sent to people who have already paid you and already know who you are.
And it is the surface most likely to get a business into trouble, because a landing page is a branch waiting to be added. The version that is safe and the version that is not look nearly identical to whoever is building it.
The misconception: a funnel exists to screen
Plenty of funnel tools were sold on the promise of screening the outcome, and plenty of owners still assume screening is what a funnel is for.
Screening is prohibited. Google's Maps content policy forbids discouraging negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones, and the practice has its own name and its own page in this glossary.
A funnel earns its keep on volume and timing, not on selection. Ask everybody, ask soon after the visit, make the link one tap, and the rating you end up with is both higher and defensible, because it came from your whole customer base rather than a slice of it.
Review funnel questions
The questions that decide whether a funnel is an asset or a liability.
What is the difference between a review funnel and review gating?
A funnel is the path. Gating is a branch inside it that decides who is shown a public review link based on how they answered a question. You can run a funnel with no branch, and that is what a compliant one is.
Does GetSetReply's funnel gate?
No. The same public review links render on every screen after a customer taps a face. The private note form on the OK and Poor screens sits above those links rather than in place of them.
Should the funnel page offer a choice of platform?
Offering a choice is fine and often helps, because a customer already signed in to one platform will finish there. What must not vary is who gets offered the choice.
When should the ask go out?
While the visit is still fresh, which for most trades means the same day or the next. No major platform publishes a rule about timing. The rules are about incentives and about selection.
Can I offer a discount for leaving a review?
No. Google's content policy names payment, discounts and free goods or services in exchange for a review as prohibited, and the FTC's 2024 rule reaches incentives that carry an implied requirement for the review to be positive.
The parts of a funnel, defined separately
A funnel with no branch
Everyone gets the same links
GetSetReply shows the same public review links on every screen of the funnel, collects what gets written into one inbox, and drafts your reply for you to post.