Are Yelp Ads Right For Your Business?

Yelp ads can be a significant source of revenue if your business has a physical location or provides services in person.

Over half a million businesses are currently running Yelp ads. From coffee shops and restaurants, to health and professional service providers, to hotels and beyond. Over 30M users rely on Yelp to find businesses worth their time and money.

If your business is brick & mortar or provides services in person, you should probably be advertising on Yelp, and in this blog post, we're going to touch on some of the reasons why.

It's a slightly newer platform, founded in 2004 vs 1994 for Yahoo! and 1998 for Google, for example. Saturation matters. It's one of the contributing factors to cost-per-click, and in turn, cost-per-lead, cost-per-sale, etc.

We've noticed a lower cost-per-result on our end when using Yelp ads, but we can't guarantee this will be the case across the board, because these figures can vary from industry to industry.

Just take a look at this key performance indicator chart for one of our clients. The overwhelming majority of their exposure on Yelp is driven by their Yelp ads. 99% of their impressions, 39% of their clicks, and 86% of their leads. These are pretty eye-opening figures.

You'll hear us say these things time and time again. There's no blatantly correct or incorrect way to do digital marketing. One marketing channel or one campaign type being right while the others are wrong.

The name of the game is efficiency. Using your advertising dollars as wisely as possible, to generate the best possible results. Heck, that's the reason why folks like us exist and are in business, to help you get there.

Sometimes we propose for our prospective or current clients to run Yelp ads. Other times, it might be their idea. Regardless, our job is to analyze the nature of your business, what your current digital marketing efforts look like, and most importantly, your advertising budget, to determine the best digital marketing options for small businesses.

The downside to Yelp ads? Their dashboard isn't anywhere remotely close to being as robust as other search engine marketing platforms. It's quite rudimentary, actually, relatively speaking. But that doesn't mean it can't generate awesome results and a solid return on investment for your business.

If we're managing your Yelp advertising effort for you, we'll still be incorporating a lot of the same methodologies and practices as we ordinarily do on other platforms such as Google ads, for example.

We still have to dial it all in, leverage keywords, write good copy, build a negative keyword list to keep undesirable traffic out and maximize your ad spend, adjust your settings, track your calls, monitor the performance, tweak things as necessary, so on and so forth. But we love it, it's a great platform, and it can certainly be a very viable tool for the right business, in the right scenarios.

If industry jargon, bar graphs, and pie charts make your skin crawl, no worries. We do digital marketing for sport, like gladiators in cyberspace.

Our pay-per-click marketing experts will be glad to overhaul your Yelp ads for you or build you a campaign from scratch, in addition to monitoring it and refining it for you month-over-month, striving to continuously improve its performance and maximize your digital marketing budget.

The first step is a quick phone chat. We want to learn about your business and assess where your digital marketing is currently at. For example, we may highlight other priorities such as website design services before discussing Yelp ads with you, if your current website is in shambles.

After we've evaluated your current campaigns as well as your online advertising needs in general, we'll send you a complimentary proposal, and if needed, schedule a follow up call to review it with you and answer any questions you may have.

Then, hopefully, we partner up, help your business shine online, and squash your competitors like a digital steam roller.

If Yelp ads sound like they might be a good fit for your business, please feel free to call us, email us, or use our online appointment tool to book your free consult.

Our digital marketing services page lists some of the many other online advertising services we provide, if you feel like another type of digital marketing might be a better fit for your business. And its submenu goes into some pretty awesome detail about these service offerings, to help provide you with even more information and hopefully help you better determine which types of pay-per-click marketing services or search engine optimization services might work best for your business.

And if you'd rather we figure it out for you, hey, that's okay too, because that's what we're here for. Just let us know what your goals are, and we'll be happy to help.

Cheers,

-AS