It’s back to the future for Gartner with a return by Peer insights to focusing on reviews – and the end of a short but dramatic flirtation with a communities-led approach.

Gartner has completed the split of Peer Insights, its customer review site, from Peer Communities, the rebranded version of its Pulse Q&A acquisition.

The Communities-led version of GPI was launched in late October but proved unpopular. Gartner was backtracking by January, promising a split in “Q2”.

This is now complete. Visitors to Gartner.com/peer-insights now reach a reviews-focused homepage. Communities moved to Gartner.com/peer-community.

Gartner pledges to drive interaction between the two sites. It talks of promoting GPI reviews on the new Peer Community site to “drive traffic to ratings and reviews” to a claimed 70,000 members. That’s more than double the membership claimed by Pulse Q&A when the Gartner acquisition was announced last year, but still surprisingly low.

The refocused enterprise technology software and services reviews site promises to highlight popular software and service categories and introduce “new optimized navigation to drive review creation and search”.

Category leadership opportunities are up for grabs

Vendors running review sourcing programs should welcome the switch. Finding reviews on the Communities-led landing page was almost impossible, and new review submissions suffered.

This is an abridged version of Destrier’s guidance for our clients. Get in touch to learn more about our enterprise peer review sourcing programs.