hibu

This company only cares about making sales.

We hired Hibu to do our online PPC advertising. From the beginning there were issues. It would take weeks to get a straight answer from anyone. They didn’t seem to care if we were getting calls or not. In the 6 months with them, their campaign generated 20 calls and more than half of them were worthless (missed calls, calls for things we do not do etc) So basically, our ROI was 0! According to Google Analytics, my bounce rate with Hibu was well over 80%, yet my organic search bounce rate was 45%. I will NEVER recommend this company to anyone and to be sure to tell them to do their due diligence. It was absolutely the worst service I received from any business. What a big disappointment and an even bigger waste of money!

We had advertised with Yellow pages for 40 years. Hibu took over the company and we continued to advertise. When our company stared slowing down we scaled down than stopped. we had a domain name with the web page. Next thing we know the address now points to a Japanese company. That does not seem like a coincidence!!! We are out our domain name that is our company’s name and not a Japanese company!!! Karma

The final product was actually pretty nice. The process of getting there was not! Our original Digital Marketing Specialist didn’t seem all that interested in building our site, but once we were reassigned, things went better and the site looked great. Now it was time to make it go live. I (not a web designer) had to go to our DNS host and make a bunch of changes that I didn’t really understand. When I asked for explanation, I was just yelled at. One of the settings was wrong, Hibu’s error not mine. It was our DNS host that discovered the problem and helped me fix it. I called them because I got no response from Hibu when I told them our site wasn’t working. All in all, the site looks very nice, but I hope we never need anything from Hibu again.

Do not do their Pay Per Call advertising (Really though, just don’t do business with them at all). In the month of January we were billed for 5 phone calls– none of which were viable.
1) A pharmacy’s automated system saying a prescription (not ours) is ready
2) Someone calling for a specific store (not ours)
3) Someone trying to fax something to an unknown person
4) Wrong number
5) Recording about being put on the Do Not Call list
We are liable for all of these calls because they were longer than 20 seconds! July cannot come quickly enough so I never have to deal with these people again.

This is a warning to anyone thinking about signing up with hibu/​yellow pages. I had a sales person literally stalk me every day to sign up or just try it out. I told him I am a seasonal business and would only need 6 months of advertising. I agreed/​verbally not written that I would do a temp 6 months and if I was happy with their services I would start back up next spring. Needless to say they are a scam! I did not generate anymore business then I could have already done on my own! I was paying $ 1200 a month for 6 months. When I went to cancel I got the run around and my sales person suddenly no longer exists or has been replaced. How convenient right around the time I needed to cancel. I spoke with the replacement salesman and canceled and told him I was done and I had fulfilled my 6 months. The next day I have a debt collector harassing me via email which I have proof! I have been doing research and have been seeing similar stories to mine. hibu will not let you get out of anything ever! You will be stuck and they get pissed off if you don’t renew! I am shocked that Google has partnered up with this horrible place. IF you check out other people complaining you will see the exact same stories as mine. Save your money and check all of the reviews real reviews from real people before agreeing to anything. Don’t even nod on the phone with these blood suckers as they will assume you are signing a contract verbally! A real legitimate business that is sincere would let you put up good/​bad reviews on their own website hibu only allows good reviews that should tell you something about this business.

Your review helps others learn about great local businesses.
Please don’t review this business if you received a freebie for writing this review, or if you’re connected in any way to the owner or employees.

This is BY FAR THE WORST COMPANY I HAVE EVER, AND I MEAN EVVVEEERRR had to deal with.
I am a webdesigner and I’ve been helping my client transfer his domain name off of hibu to
after they canceled his account 3 months ago. I have transferred domains literally hundreds of times for people and never had any issues as close to how bad this experience was (actually still is).
Hibu works with a 3^rd party called yellow book and when they create you a website they also create you a domain and put it under their name. With a simple search on whois we found that the registrant email was not us and some email like
Here’s the issue, we have no access to that email, hibu has no way of changing that email to our address so when Wix sends out an email to confirm the transer WE CAN’T CONFIRM IT. I have called hibu 7 times and everytime until now they weren’t even able to find that email from Wix.
The hibu CS guy said the only thing I can do is call every day and go through all the steps and then find out if they got the email from Wix and can confirm it. If it’s not confirmed within 24 hours than this whole process has to start over. And what if they don’t find it like all the other 6 people who couldn’t find it. I actually think they had no idea where to look and were just bs-​ing us on the phone.
HIBU if you are reading this I strongly advise you to get your act together because by looking at your other 1 star reviews I think there’s a whole slew of people that are just as frustrated and upset as me.
What a shame of a company to exist. P. S. the website you made my client was absolutely hideous and you were charging him close to $ 100/​month for that, c’mon!

I am very impressed with the professional, knowledgeable, friendly service! Jason was so great to work with! He is very patient, knows his stuff, PLUS he genuinely wanted to do his best for us. Our website for Ok Tire looks fantastic!

We’ve worked with hibu for almost a year and we couldn’t be more pleased with the customer service and results from our partnership with hibu. My strategist, Brandon Flynn, is so personable, thorough, and I trust his expertise! He goes above and beyond to make sure I am well taken care of. As a creative agency competing in a tough market, my strategist came up with a unique approach to our SEM campaign that maximized our modest budget, resulting in a clear jump in qualified leads and new business. We hired hibu to also run an SEM campaign for our coworking space, once again producing a strong return on investment. We look forward to a strong and lasting relationship with hibu, leveraging our partnership to provide quality digital marketing services to our clients.

3 months and 4 phone calls. You tell me.

Very disappointed with this company. I think they are a scam. Customer service is all over seas and hard to talk to. DO NOT listen to their lies or sign up for their services. You will regret it! I held payment for 4 months trying to get them to correct invalid information on our page. They scammed the owner into signing a contract for expensive print ads that don’t even exist. RUN from these people FAST!

Started a business back in April and they told me they would make a website, put my business on google, bing, yellow pages, etc. After 2 months they finally made a website that looked like a 3^rd grader designed. After months and months and months i was told i would be put online, I finally canceled them in December. STAY AWAY, FAR FAR AWAY. Waste of money and hope someone can learn from my mistake before they get sucked in.

After advertising with them for a couple of years I added a second business to the listing because I was to get a website for it. The website never appeared, the person who sold it to me was «promoted» and they just shrugged it off. I paid the bill monthly anyway until they started to call to renew the listing. I let them know in no uncertain terms I wouldnt continue to do business. I got no less than 15 more sales calls, one guy called me 3 times in a row when I hung up on him. I finally found if you use the «f» word they get offended and leave you alone for awhile. Did I mention they sent daily sales emails? I asked them repeatedly for a final bill and they refused to give it to me. Today they now say I owe $ 300.00 more which I know is a lie and so I will be reporting them. They refuse to give me an accounting of charges and payments. Believe me you dont want to go near this company.

Back in fall of 2013 I started to receive this magazine at my home in Philadelphia. When I asked friends and colleagues if they got this magazine, no one else told me they got it. I just googled Hibu and learned that the über-​local small magazine was distributed for free to the 5,000 highest-​income households in each demographic market, which now explains why I received it. I enjoyed the articles in the magazine because they were about very local businesses and about people making a difference in the community. There were many «corporate» Hibu ads exhorting the reader to get involved and contribute content.
So, I thought, what the heck, I have owned a successful business in the community for 32 years and made it through the wretched recession. As a journalism major, I write easily, so I pitched my idea to the editor. He said go for it. I went for it and wrote the article.
The Hibu editor called me a few weeks later, saying that I needed to shorten my article to fit their pages. When I explained that shortening the article would take away from the feeling of the article, he suggested that I could lengthen the article and they would publish it on the cover and make it the cover story for the May issue
I spent many hours writing a «from-​the-​heart» touching article about how my godfather taught my husband everything he knew about cabinetmaking and that our business was a lasting legacy and testament to his teachings. I even enlisted a free-​lance photographer to take photographs and he did it free of charge so he could get photo credits in hopes of getting his name around. The photographer was great and came back to our business three separate times to get the perfect shots.
I usually received the magazine the first week of the month, when mid-​to-​late May rolled around and there were still no signs of a magazine, I wrote several emails to the editor and received no response, not even an out-​of-​the-​office auto-​reply. I then called his cell phone. I received a recording saying the cell phone number was not in service.
So back in mid-​May I googled Hibu — South Philadelphia Life Magazine and the search came up with no results. Today I googled it again and learned that the entire Hibu organization was shut down, email accounts canceled and cell phone numbers canceled.
You would think that a professional organization (or so I thought) would at least personally inform its contributors (who contributed for free). Poor organization, poor planning and lots of wasted time. Shame on Hibu!

Complete scam, the sell you advertising then when it does nothing they say you have to do the legwork for your website and you have to pay for clicks. What am I paying a monthly fee for. If they would have told me I have to do all the work and pay extra for people to visit my site I would have made my own website on godaddy for $ 15 and paid someone else to help push my site.

After the pushy sales person got my signature for a year contract, they completely abandoned me.
They didn’t provide instructions, training, or follow up with their advertising services (despite multiple requests). I have spent at least 9 hours on the phone with their support team trying to figure out what’s going on and how to fix these glitches… and six months later, it’s still not working properly and we still can’t use the products we’ve been paying thousands of dollars a month for.
The few things that are ‘working’ aren’t really ‘working’ because they are only generating 5 – 10 phone calls a month for $ 1000+ a month. They even set up one of my accounts in the wrong county, which is unbelievable dumb.
I’ve never felt so unappreciated by a company in my life. I’m pretty sure the DMV makes happier customers. This is quite literally the worst customer experience I have ever had from any company, ever.

I’d like to thank this company for using one of my Unilocal photos without asking me.
Even the «Courtesy of» was incorrect since the photo existed on Unilocal,not TripAdvisor.
I’ve sent an e-​mail to the local editor of the advertising magazine for a response, but I’m still waiting for a response from mid-​2013 on another issue.
I get the feeling they have 2 employees and a load of volunteers but here’s hoping for a positive response.
The local editor replied to my e-​mail fairly quickly. She wrote about finding the photo in a thread on TripAdvisor, and she uses photos from TripAdvisor because they have a liberal usage policy. (They’re sticklers for gorgeous, professional-​level photos that don’t always resemble reality.) When I questioned her about «thread» and whether she found it being distributed, I got no useful response.
In any case, she apologized, and said that she’d give me credit in the next advertiser, but it didn’t feel like much of a victory.
Update 2014.03.22: To be fair, the local editor made a correction and gave me credit for my photo.

File a complaint with the better business bureau. I just did it online. If we all share our issues with them yhey have to listen and make hibu do something.