Yelp (ed) - Yelp (ing) or Yelp (inator)

[marindependent]

Is there anyone out there that can stand up and speak positive words about YELP and their advertising program?

That is, not the free listing, but the Paid Monthly Program out there.

 

[pfg1]

Yelp is a good turkey call... that's about all I can offer on that

 

[marindependent]

I dont know what a turkey call is... but it does not sound like an advertising success story.

 

[Professor Leads]

I have used Yelp for many small businesses and yes it does work very well for local service-based businesses. However, I doubt it would translate well to the insurance industry. I doubt many people are using Yelp for insurance.

I would create the free account and get some good review going first. I don't think I would pay for their advertising though.

Make sure you get your business certified with Google as well. Then get some local citations done. Yelp is just another citation really.

One thing you have to be careful about with Yelp is bad reviews...you can not prevent nor delete them if a competitor decides to sabotage you. I've never had it happen but know some local small biz's that have.

 

[walthamny]

I have used yelp for my tax filing business and it has worked well as after doing their personal taxes, I cross sell life insurance and investments.
I would never try them for life insurance, it is more of a restaurant review site that is trying to branch into other things.
I use yelp for prospecting all the time. I added all my customers that have a yelp account and connected with them. Very few have yelp accounts, however, I find out which local businesses they are recommending. Sometimes I get a direct recommendation, sometimes I just have to call and tell them I want to do business with them because my clients are raving about their business.

If you don't have many clients, you can also look for local carpenters, barbers, plumbers, dog walkers and see which ones are highly recommended. That means good chance they have some income and they are better candidate for a cold walk in or cold call.

 

[FancyPants]

As for the advertising on Yelp, I've heard some bad things about it. Businesses start but don't continue advertising with them get blackmailed with bad reviews for their business displaying at the top of the review list, low visibility in rankings and so forth. They might have curbed these practices in recent years, but you might want to do your research on that before you buy an ad. Their new practice seems to be to sell ads of competitors on your Yelp page then making you buy ads to remove those competitor ads. It doesn't hurt to put a Yelp page up since most people will do a search for your business name to vet you. The competitor ads appearing on your page will have a 1% or so response rate so I wouldn't worry too much about your page sending business to the competition.

Their CPM rates are super high, like crazy high. The 2012 rate card (might have changed since then), is like $600 CPM, meaning for a thousand ads shown, it's $600. Usually you're gonna have response of 1% or so, so 10 clicks, of those maybe 1 converts. There is no commission that's worth $600 that you could generate from Yelp. Even if the price has gone down by 50% since 2012, again, there's no commission worth $300 that you could generate from Yelp.