Yelp is one of the most popular local search and reviews online services. The platform helps businesses connect with customers through free profiles and paid advertising.
Once you set up a free Yelp profile for your business, you get calls from Yelp sales agents offering you premium features and advertising packages to help you generate even more leads.
While these offers may sound attractive – especially if you already have many customers telling you they found your business on Yelp – there are a few important things you need to know before you commit your advertising dollars.
This article offers you an unbiased objective insight into Yelp’s advertising platform. The information in it will help you make better-informed decisions about where to allocate your business’s digital advertising spend to get the best return on your investment.
So read on to find out whether Yelp advertising is worth the cost or not.
First, let’s take a look at the fundamentals of how Yelp works.
How Yelp Works
Maybe you know and maybe you don’t, but Yelp offers two types of paid features to businesses: Business Page Upgrades and Yelp Ads.
Here’s a quick rundown of what each entails:
Business Page Upgrades
These are premium features that allow you to enhance the way your Yelp profile page looks and functions. They include:
Competitors’ Ads Restriction: A free profile on Yelp shows your competitors’ ads on your profile page. However, if you advertise, yourbusiness will show up when potential customers search for other local businesses in your niche, while your competitors’ ads will be restricted on your profile.
Enhanced Slideshow: This feature lets you organize the images from your business in any way you like. It starts with a photo chosen by you and then cycles through the rest.
Call to Action: You have the option to add a call to action on your profile page. This can send visitors to any page of your choosing, such as an order form, coupon, and so on.
Yelp Ads
Yelp ads work in much the same way as Google Ads and Facebook Ads in that business owners can pay to get preferential rankings and placements.
With these ads, you get the opportunity to target potential clients as they are deciding which business they want to spend their money on.
When you sign up for advertising, your ad gets impressions on the profiles of your competitors and other companies.
You also get historical metrics to show you how your campaign is doing.
This includes the number of ad clicks, ad impressions, cost per click, total ad spend, and more.
However, the results of Yelp advertising are mixed, and for every business that reports success on the platform, you will find another that labels Yelp’s advertising program as a scam.
This article primarily covers the advertising packages, but the information contained here applies to the upgrades program as well.
What Is The Cost To Advertise On Yelp?
Now that you know how Yelp works, it’s time to understand how the advertising platform charges local businesses.
Yelp charges on a cost per click (CPC) basis. You can start advertising for just $150/month, and you can choose how you spend your monthly budget.
The amount you pay for each click varies widely, with some advertisers, such as food establishments paying amounts as low as $0.30 for each click, while others in more competitive industries like law pay up to $40 or more per click.
Not All Industries Are Created Equal
Whether or not Yelp ads are effective for helping your business generate additional leads has a lot to do with the industry you’re in.
For instance, there are 1383 categories on Yelp, with restaurants being the most notable.
One Los-Angeles based restaurant, Bottega Louie has well over 16,000 reviews while the leading trivia host only has 35.
This goes to show that some types of businesses just don’t get searched for on Yelp.
The key to success is critical thinking and deep research into how your customers typically find you in your space.
You must put yourself in your customers’ shoes and determine whether or not they’re using Yelp to find your business and others like it.
At this point, I should state that Yelp representatives don’t care if you’re a restaurant owner or a trivia host – you’ll get a call no matter what industry you’re in.
Having said that, there’s no doubt that lots of prospective customers frequently use this platform. They consider it an extremely useful source for business information, and it can be a valuable channel of advertising for some business owners.
So, if you’re still considering advertising on Yelp, here are some of the pros and cons:
Pros and Cons of Advertising on Yelp
In this section, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits and drawbacks of Yelp advertising.
Pros of Yelp Ads
Free Features: A Yelp business account includes a wide range of free features, most of which are extremely helpful for small businesses.
No Cancellation Fee: You can get Yelp’s paid features on a month-to-month basis, and there’s no fee if you decide to quit the service.
Budget Control: You have full control over what you spend each day or month so you can stay within your budget.
Easy to Manage: You can have an ad live on the platform in just a few clicks of the mouse.
Effective Ads: Yelp ads can be effective – if you’re in the right industry. For some businesses, Yelp ads offer the best return compared to Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter, and Instagram Ads. For these businesses, Yelp is a source of consistent bottom-of-the-funnel traffic to their websites.
Cons of Yelp Ads
Costly Advertising: Yelp ads are quite expensive which puts the premium amenities out of reach of many small businesses. According to reviews online, some merchants have reported prices of $20 and more per click for meager results.
Limited Targeting Options: Although you can set listing photos and specify all the special features of your business, you’re unable to set location controls or keywords for any of your ads. Yelp’s targeting options remain a mystery, which means that you’ll likely get lots of people contacting you about services you don’t provide (unless your business offers general services).
Questionable Reporting: Many business owners report that Yelp’s reporting is inflated and unsubstantiated. The analytics cannot be validated using other tracking software like Google Analytics.
Negative Reviews: Yelp has a poor reputation on sites like TrustPilot, with many of the platform’s merchant features getting disappointing reviews from business owners.
Aggressive Sales Team: Some user reviews online show that the sales agents don’t seem to care if Yelp ads are ideal for businesses in your industry or not. They’ll try to rope you in regardless.
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