We Are A Yelp®
Advertising Agency
Emet Digital is one of Yelp’s top
official Premier Partners.
As program members, we can take advantage of innovative, new opportunities to help our clients connect more effectively with their local customer base.
With over 150 million reviews posted to date, Yelp is one of the largest review generation platforms in the world. In addition to posting reviews, users can use Yelp to follow their favorite businesses, find events, explore user-generated lists and interface with other Yelpers.
Yelp is a particularly exciting platform from a marketing standpoint because those who visit it are typically in the process of vetting businesses and reviewing their options in order to make a purchase or contract a service. Yelp users differ from those on other platforms like Facebook or Google in that they are already much closer to the point of conversion. Learning to optimize your presence on Yelp and take advantage of all the tools and features it has to offer has great potential for high-quality lead generation.
According to Nielsen, 79% of Yelp visitors make a purchase within a week after searching for a business.
As an official Yelp Premier Partner, our team at Emet Digital has exclusive access and insight into how to best utilize Yelp’s features and optimize your company’s business listing to produce tangible results. The first step is creating a listing that is both informative and aesthetically pleasing to users while satisfying the Yelp algorithm to boost its visibility among the competition.
Optimizing your Yelp listing involves providing comprehensive information in all the available fields, including relevant images and applying search engine optimization to give your listing an advantage in the search process. When you partner with Emet Digital, we design and implement an engaging listing for you to reach as many people as possible and turn them into customers.
Companies can further increase the visibility of their business listing through taking advantage of Yelp Ads. These paid options can be broken down into two distinct categories; business page upgrades and Yelp Ads.
Business owners can pay for additional upgrades to their profile that provide further opportunities for customer engagement and conversion. In addition to visual upgrades like an enhanced slideshow and the capacity to include video, business owners can also pay to include a Call To Action button on their page for more direct customer communication and even restrict the appearance of competitor’s ads.
Here are the main differences between
Paid vs. Organic Profile Features:
| Organic | Paid |
|---|---|
|
Business Info(hours, contact info, descriptions, etc.) |
Ads (placement at the top of search results) |
|
Photos |
Custom Ads (choose text and which reviews or photos to display) |
|
Reviews (and ability to respond) |
Call to Action Button |
|
Business Updates |
Business Highlights (coupons, sales, etc.) |
|
Services Offered |
Enhanced Slideshow |
|
Amenities |
Competitors Ads Restriction |
|
|
Featured Video |
|
|
Portfolios |
Yelp Advertising vs.
Google Advertising
So, what are some of the major differences between Yelp and Google pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns?
Google offers both search and display network ad campaigns in a variety of formats (text, responsive, image, video, shopping, video, etc.) whereas Yelp only offers search display ads.
Though their ad format is more limited, Yelp does offer a Custom Ads feature which gives the ability for advertisers to select custom text and as well as choose which photos or reviews they want displayed. You can also choose to display business highlights like current sales and even include a Call to Action button. Custom ads take up more real estate in the search results and allow you to distinguish yourself from competitors before the user even selects a listing. Your ads will receive optimal placement at the top of the search results when users input relevant keywords and will be featured in your competitor’s Yelp listings to help entice them to choose your business instead.
Perhaps the most important difference to understand between Yelp and Google advertising has to do with the intent and demographics of the audience that your ads reach. Google is the world’s largest search engine, handling roughly 5 billion searches per day whereas Yelp receives less than 200 million unique monthly visitors. Thus, advertising on Google has the potential to reach far more consumers. However, for most businesses, quality is generally more important than quantity. For example, a roofing company would benefit more from an ad that reaches ten people in the market for a new roof than a thousand people who have no interest in roofing services. This is the distinct difference between the user intent of the Google audience compared to that of Yelp. The following numbers help exhibit what makes the Yelp user unique and so potentially valuable:
- 82% of Yelp users use the platform when they are already intent upon making a purchase
- 92% of users reported that they sometimes, frequently, or almost always make a purchase after visiting Yelp
- 79% of user said they make a purchase within a week of searching on Yelp
These statistics point to the fact that Yelp users are much more likely to be converted to make an actual sale compared with other platforms because consumers visit the site with purchase intent and thus require less convincing.
Another key difference between Yelp and Google is the audience demographic. Because Google is such a popular, broad search engine, their demographic is much larger and less defined than Yelp’s. Around half of Yelp users have an annual income over $100,000/year and thus have more disposable income. Furthermore, %81 of Yelp users have a college background and %70 fall between the ages of 18 and 54. These attributes make for an excellent audience to advertise to because on top of their intent to make a purchase, Yelp users are young, educated professionals with money to spend. Businesses that sell directly to consumers have often reported higher return on investment (ROI) for this reason, though the returns and overall effectiveness vary from industry to industry. Depending on your particular business and marketing strategy, the most successful approach might even include advertising on both platforms for different reasons. However, in order to get the most of your advertising budget, it’s important to understand the difference between Yelp and Google and what each has to offer in order to decide how to best utilize them for your business.
Cost & Pricing Guide
The cost of Yelp advertising varies based on your industry (keyword search) and location.
Yelp offers both a contract option which provides access to all Yelp’s ad services as well as the assistance of a representative or a self-service option which allows you to choose which of their ads and services you would like to utilize. Like other platforms, Yelp charges for advertising on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. This means that the amount you pay is based on the number of clicks your ad receives and thus you will only be charged when your ad begins to receive traffic. However, the cost-per-click is not set at a fixed rate and will depend on the amount of competition in your service area and industry.
When you start advertising through Yelp, the platform will solicit a CPC bid from you as well as the search radius (distance from your business to the user) you would like to advertise to. This bid will be stacked against your competitors for real estate in the Yelp search results. Yelp then assesses your profile as well as those of the competition and determines a “click-through-rate”, or the likelihood that a user will click on your profile based on your ad. Yelp then multiples this click-through-rate with your initial bid to calculate an Ad Ranking Score. When a user searches, your ranking score will be compared to all other relevant sponsored listings within the search criteria and the highest score will be awarded a premium position at the top of the search results. However, you will only be charged according to your bid when the user actually clicks your ad.
Yelp’s CPC ad structure means that the overall cost of ads will likely fluctuate on a daily basis depending on the amount of clicks you receive. You can easily manage your advertising budget in order to allocate it over time by setting daily or monthly caps on ad spending. When you set your budget, Yelp then determines the best bid amount each day based on the amount you choose. These ads are easy to create, edit or delete in just a few clicks and the platform also provides you with metrics so you can adjust your strategy accordingly until you find which approach works best in your area and industry. Many businesses have found that Yelp offers higher ROI than other platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram because despite having a higher average CPC, their users are visiting with the intent to purchase and are thus far more likely to convert to actual sales. Learning how to maximize the effectiveness of your Yelp ad campaigns can bear incredible results when done correctly.
The Value of Yelp Ads and How to Maximize Effectiveness
Yelp advertising is particularly valuable when a business listing is being consistently optimized and the business owner is actively engaging with users through the platform.
As mentioned above, your listing’s click-through-rate plays a major factor in your ad being featured in the search results and that rate is determined by how well your listing is curated and maintained. Creating and maintaining a strong listing requires a whole array of tasks, from responding to all user reviews to frequently updating high-quality photos and updating users on new features of your business like discounts, new products, etc. Making sure your profile is fully optimized with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind is a continuous process through which you must utilize all of the options Yelp has to offer.
The platform is also in the process of rolling out Yelp Connect, a new social component that allows business owners to better engage with Yelp users through a model similar to other social media platforms. With Yelp Connect, business owners will be able to post about their company and entice users to follow them and share their content with friends. Though Yelp Connect is currently still in its nascent stages, engagement through this new feature will certainly factored into Yelp’s overall assessment of your business listing. Thus, engaging through Yelp connect will also be crucial to optimizing your listing to the fullest extent.
Ultimately, there is no standard formula for how to make Yelp advertising work best for your individual business as so many factors go into achieving tangible results. Making the most of Yelp ads takes consistent attention, management and analysis because what works for one business in one market is not guaranteed to succeed in another. As with all forms of marketing, producing the highest possible return on your investment requires commitment to studying the details of consumer behavior among the target audience you wish to reach and analyzing the data from your campaigns to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Work With a
Yelp Premier Partner
At Emet Digital, we are particularly excited about getting in on the ground floor as an official Yelp Premier Partner because the platform has great potential for generating high-quality leads that are primed for conversion. Their continued evolution and notable effort to empower business owners to better engage with consumers signify their commitment to carving out a unique space in the digital marketplace. Since our partnership with Yelp began, we have been working together with their team to fully understand just how we can utilize our access and growing knowledge to give our clients the competitive edge they are looking for.
