A Yelp Ads PPC campaign can yield significant benefits for your business, but only if the service is used strategically and managed carefully. This is where Wodu comes in—we help you maximize returns on your Yelp Ads investment.
Advertising has traditionally fulfilled two functions: informing and persuading. Ads inform a potential customer about a firm or product and identify its ability to meet their needs while working to persuade the customer that they have found the best match to their requirements and preferences.
Consumers today are faced with a massively expanded array of advertising and have access to far more information during the buying journey. The Internet presents a multitude of options during the initial consideration stage, and buyers can engage a wider scope of data in greater detail during the active evaluation stage.
The range of choices for closure, or the purchase stage, is also expanded—there are more places to buy things in general, including online for many business categories. Finally, during the post-purchase stage, consumers can now promote their impressions via a variety of online platforms.
In the digital age, the consumer journey has a higher degree of complexity, so advertising needs to do much more to be effective.
By increasing product prominence in a crowded market, offering a convenient source of information to aid in the evaluation stage, and providing immediate access to a post-purchase feedback platform, Yelp empowers marketers to exert a stronger influence during each stage of the consumer journey.
Yelp can be a powerful tool, and its reach is unquestionable with more than 80 million people monthly using the platform to look for businesses of all types. However, user experience gained since the platform’s launch in 2004 reveals a number of important factors to consider if your Yelp Ads campaign is to be successful. This is where Wodu’s professional Yelp Ads Management Service comes in.
Wodu has been helping clients navigate the wilderness of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising since the genre emerged.
We bring decades of online marketing experience to bear, ensuring that your investment in Yelp advertising brings the results you are looking for. We have learned which strategies fit specific niches and needs, and how to amplify the chances of success while minimizing the possibility of negative advertising ROI in the PPC game.
Yelp is a social media platform that allows consumers to search, browse, and review local businesses around the world. Yelp is available in 35 countries, with versions in 42 languages and listings for over 5 million businesses, but more than 90% of Yelp’s user base is in the US, where it is the largest local business search and review platform.
Yelp users tend to be between 35–54 years old (34% of users); 36% of users are 55 or older, and 57% have an income of more than $100,000. In other words, they are members of the prime target category for many businesses. Yelp users are generally in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey—they have a need but have not decided who they will do business with.
8 out of 10 Yelp searches don’t include a specific business name—users are searching for a product or service with general terms like Thai restaurant, beauty salon, or plumbing repair.
Yelp is mobile-oriented: of the more than 178 million monthly visitors drawn to its platforms, 90 million use mobile apps or mobile web browsers. There over 250 million reviews posted on Yelp, and about 60% of all reviews and photos are submitted via smartphone.
This mobile orientation implies that many Yelp users are on the move, by car or as foot traffic, actively searching for a product or service they need with the intention to buy. Yelp’s own research indicates that 83% of users hire or buy from a business they found on Yelp; 57% contact a business they found within a day.
Yelp’s search function operates in much the same way as any search engine. On each results page, a single slot at the top is reserved for a paid search ad chosen for relevance and prominently labeled “Ad” to distinguish it from the organic results that follow. In this way, advertising effectively moves the business to the top of visibility in a setting where many competing firms or products are being considered. If no relevant advertisement is available, no paid search link appears in the results.
Yelp Ads provides information about a business while giving the business prominence in a user’s consideration set.
Yelp offers standard PPC advertising packages, with cost per click varying according to the type of business within the more than 1300 Yelp categories, demand in that particular category, and geographic area. Users set a daily average ad spend budget and only pay when someone clicks on their ad.
The ads can be quite effective. Researchers from the Harvard Business School studied 7,209 randomly-chosen restaurants that were given free Yelp Ad accounts for 3 months. The businesses had no previous experience using online advertising.
Results showed an average 19% increase in page views, a 7%–14% increase in purchase intention outcomes such as calling the business, viewing map directions, and browsing the restaurant’s website, and a 5% increase in the number of customer reviews received. The study also indicated that Yelp has much to offer independent, local businesses—national chain restaurants gained less from Yelp advertising than independent and local chain restaurants.
Business owner reports and online reviews show that overall results vary—the business type, available advertising budget, importance of online reviews, and invested effort in monitoring and managing the advertising campaign can be decisive factors in the level of benefit associated with Yelp Ads.
Wodu’s Yelp Ads Management Service starts with consultation aimed at evaluating the match between the Yelp Ads program and your business type, needs, and goals. If Yelp is a fit for your business, we help you design an advertising plan, then handle the set-up, optimization, and ongoing management of your Yelp PPC campaign.
There is no question that a properly designed and managed Yelp Ad campaign can generate increased customer awareness and activity around a business. However, managing a Yelp Ads campaign requires experience and involves a serious time investment. Failure here is the source of many users’ disappointing experiences with Yelp Ads.
With Wodu leading your Yelp Ads effort, the chances of success are boosted and you are left free to work on other important aspects of growing your business. Contact us here at Wodu and let’s see if Yelp Ads can work for you.