Yelp appears to have been gaining more and more online awareness with consumers, since it is the #1 online review site. I know I frequent Yelp more often these days. Clients had been asking me, “should I advertise with Yelp?”, but often I would defer to Google PPC as I was skeptical of what Yelp could deliver. I would tell them, if you’re getting results on Google and there’s more inventory still available, add to your Google budget.
However, finally I placed several eager retail clients on Yelp. One client is in Houston, the other in an affluent southern California area. I figured it was worth a try, minimal risk, and I thought maybe the consumers on Yelp were just as far along in the sales funnel as a Google PPC customer.
I am an advocate of tracking all your marketing spend to fully understand results and ROI, which I usually do with call tracking phone numbers for retail brick and mortar businesses. Effectively tracking leads and understanding ROI from Yelp advertising is more difficult than other marketing tactics. It doesn’t make sense to put a call tracking number anywhere in Yelp, so you have to rely on asking consumers when they call your business. Yelp does, however, provide some metrics, like page views , or ad clicks. As you can see impressions in yellow are when we started advertising on Yelp–definitely an increase. When looking through our website’s analytics Yelp ads drove very low bounce rate traffic (25-30% range).
Why We Pulled the Plug on Yelp Advertising
Nonetheless, at the end of the day we calculated a much higher cost/call and lower ROI than Google PPC, and we decided to put Yelp ads on hold and put the budget into other more effective tactics, primarily Google Adwords.
If your primary objective for your business is leads and you cannot validate that a particular tactic is driving low cost leads, stop it and put your money where you know you can get lower cost per lead.
I have several clients on Yelp and none have received very promising results. So I’m not advocating you not use Yelp, but I would minimize your budget exposure to Yelp by asking for shorter contracts until it proves itself (they require advertising commitments). And to be honest, the fact that Yelp requires you to commit to an advertising contract is a big downer for me — why lock in a business if something is not working. In Yelp’s defense, they’ve always stated the best results occur after you’ve been advertising with them for an extended period…take that for what it’s worth (kind of like the fox that guards the hen house).
Have you advertised on Yelp? What are your thoughts?
Related post: How to get rid of negative Yelp reviews.