AVOID yelp.
I spent a couple hours with them on the phone and a whole bunch of red flags came up. Their selling practices seem
really deceptive.
They use a really weird ranking service from an obscure digital marketing company called "Quantcast". What they do over the phone is they take the user to the rankings on the Quantcast site and show you that Yelp rank pretty high. What they don't tell you however is that Quantcast only measures traffic from websites that pay for the Quantcast traffic counting service, unlike Alexa for example, who rank all traffic from all websites without requiring counters and don't do paid rankings. When I mentioned that Yelp doesn't even rank in the top 10 for Alexa, I was told that Alexa "isn't legit because it's owned by Amazon".
HUGE red flag right there.
The other problem with them is that unlike all the other free online directories, Yelp puts ads for other businesses ON YOUR AD! You have to
pay $50 per month to get rid of this. You also have to pay to add more images. In total, you could end up blowing $75 a month just on "page upgrades" to make your ad equal with what all the other directors offer
for free.
Next we have their horrifyingly expensive ad campaigns. Think google adwords is expensive at around $400 a month? Try Yelp at a whopping $750 per month, with a
best-case-scenario conversion rate of 25%.
They sent me this graph to demonstrate the "improvement" in listing performance during a paid ad campaign - apparently this is lifted from a landscaping contractor in my area (I call bull****, but anyway...):
So what we're seeing here is 10 months paid, so $7500 spent. Over those ten months, the ad has generated a pathetic 330 views, with the month of may having a projected total of 35 views. That's an average of 36 views per month, or 20 bucks PER VIEW! To put that into contrast, my facebook ad that I ran for one day reached over 7500 people.
It would take Yelp 17 years to get the reach that facebook gets in a day!
This example has 15 months of free advertising which got 96 views, an average of 6.4 views per month. So if you subtract this listing's organic reach from it's total reach during a paid campaign, really what this person bought is 30 views per month, at $25 per view.
Of those 426 views, 172 of those turned into leads. At a total spend of $7500, that's $44 per lead. Now lets look at leads:
So according to this, from august to may, the period of the paid campaign, about 154 leads were generated, for an average of 15.4 leads per month. About 21 leads were generated during the unpaid period, for an organic average of 1.4 leads per month. Subtracting the organic average from the paid average gets us a paid improvement of 14 leads per month, or $53.50 per lead.
According to Yelp, 70% of all leads turn into paid jobs, so that's 9.8 jobs per month, or $76 per job. Assuming 100% of those are mowing customers, you're looking at losing 10% of your gross from EACH account to advertising.
That's a bad deal. Your TOTAL ad budget should be 10%, that includes adwords, flyers, the whole shebang.
But lets look more closely at those leads. The winter of 2018 was a REALLY BAD one! Notice how the bulk of the leads go from october to january. They peaked around november, and then sharply dropped off. By the time we get to march and spring cleanup time, the leads have gone back to pre-paid levels.
My guess would be that most of the "leads" during winter were one time calls asking for snow removal because their regular guy was swamped.
NOT. WORTH. IT.