Is Yelp Advertising Worth It?

Is Advertising On Yelp Worth It?

It’s 2019, and if your business has a decent website with your phone number listed on it, then chances are you have been contacted by a Yelp Advertising sales agent. Yes, the good ol’ fashion cold call is still alive and well, even if you’re a big advertiser like Yelp. I for one think it’s quite funny and ironic that Yelp, being the huge advertising company that they are, is still relying on cold calling businesses and leaving daily voicemails to sell their advertising services. You would think if they were so good at advertising that they wouldn’t need to repeatedly call businesses begging them to sign up for their advertising service. But regardless of that, their persistence finally paid off one day when they were able to get me on the phone.

The Yelp Advertising Sales Pitch

I had the Yelp Advertising sales number saved in my contacts, so I wouldn’t be fooled into getting trapped into an hour long conversation, and this help me avoid them for awhile. I usually would just have to delete all their messages at the end of the week from my voicemail. Then one day my company line rang with a number that I didn’t recognize so I picked it up, and yep you guessed it, it was a Yelp Advertising salesman. “Here we go again,” I thought to myself as I tried to sound cheerful on the phone.

Surprisingly, the sales person was a young guy from NYC that kept the conversation from seeming like it was a traditional sales pitch and more on the lighter note. He actually conveyed the benefits of the Yelp advertising program pretty well, and had me asking more questions about their CPC and potential ROI for businesses in the digital services realm. Looking back at the conversation, it was mainly typical stuff that they are instructed to say and highlight selling points such as “Yelp is the one of the only platforms on the intent that people come on with high buyer intent,” which they try to use to justify their high CPC. “When people come to Yelp they are already in the buying mode and they are just looking for reassurance in their purchase,” I remember him saying.

This all sounded good and dandy at the time, but given that I’ve been using Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and other cost per click advertising networks for the past decade, I was sort of skeptical and knew that there is nothing guaranteed when it comes to paid advertising. The only way I would know for sure is to actually test out the Yelp advertising platform for myself and see how well it actually worked. So I pulled the trigger and signed up for a $15/day advertising budget, which I didn’t mind since I could pause the campaign at anytime and wouldn’t have to pay $15/day for 30 consecutive days.

However, I should also point out the bigger expense that doesn’t seem so big in how they pitch it, which is the additional $4/day package that gives your ad a call to action button and also eliminates competitor ads from displaying on your business listing page. I thought well $4/day isn’t bad, thinking that I could also pause this or turn it off anytime, but no this is a fixed amount that you sign up for every day for the whole month. This is where Yelp makes their money, as they are already getting a confirmed $120/month from you without sending you a single lead. This is complete bullshit in my honest opinion, since any other paid advertising service doesn’t charge you for a call to action button and they also sure as hell don’t have other competitor ads within your ad. Despite being a little irritated about all these surprise charges, I was still somewhat optimistic in trying out the Yelp advertising program, and was eager to see the quality of their leads. Plus they told me I would get $300 in free advertising spend; which later I learned is another trick they used to make it more appealing. The $300 is applied over 6 months, so only $50 per month, which is really nothing given their high CPC

Yelp Ads Cost

In the first day of my campaign I saw no clicks and no ad spend. “Ok, maybe it’s going to take awhile for it to start displaying in the system,” I thought to myself. The interesting thing about Yelp advertising is that it isn’t a very intuitive system, and laser focused targeting isn’t an option. Yelp gives you only three categories to select when choosing the industries that best describe your business, which will determine part of the targeting. The other part of the targeting is your business location. So in this example, I had Washington, DC as my location and the categories were web designer, marketing, and consulting.

This meant that my ad would appear whenever anyone was searching for web design, marketing, or consulting firms in the Washington, DC area. This is a big problem since there are so many sub categories of those three main categories that people could be looking specifically for, and you’re paying top dollar for them land on your site for less than 30 seconds just to hit the back button. The sad part is that I wish this was at least the case with my test, but it actually turned out to be a far worse scenario, which I’ll go further into detail in the next section.

The second day of my campaign proved to be a little more active with two clicks on my ad, which reflected in my ad spend at $30 total. “Hey wait a minute I put $15/day budget,” I thought to myself. I looked over the logs to see that one of the clicks actually came in on the first day around 11:30 pm, which I initially thought was a bit strange. So I had a total of two clicks to my website’s “schedule a free consultation” contact form, which was a link on the ad but not my call to action link that was a call button. Again, I found that to be a little odd someone would bypass the call to action button that was offering $100 off when they called from the ad, but I didn’t think much of it since it was after business hours.

So I was only two days into my Yelp advertising campaign, when I started to have doubts about the whole thing. I mean I was paying $15 per click with nothing to show for it. When I made the $15/day ad budget I was informed that I would be getting anywhere from 3 to 8 clicks per day, but he couldn’t confirm any firgure because as he put it “he doesn’t even know how the system calculates CPC,” which should have been a huge red flag.

Yelp Advertising Results

I started to really dig deep on day three and see what exactly was going on, as I had now three clicks on my ad to my website contact form. I had started the campaign on a Friday and had a busy weekend away from email, so on Monday I went through all my emails to see if these people had even filled out the consultation request form. I was shocked at what I saw. I had gotten nothing but spammy emails from people advertising their “buy prescription drugs for cheap,” websites.

I couldn’t believe it. I was actually paying top dollar to get spammed. “Wow, how wonderful,” I thought to myself. Despite now being really irritated, I still held off and waited a couple more days to see if it was just a fluke.

I believe it was either day four or five, when I got an email from someone wanting to design a brochure for a furniture company. I found it pretty odd that they were asking for graphic design work, but I thought hey maybe it’s just the poor targeting that Yelp advertising provides. So I said what the hell and entertained the idea of designing a brochure for this person’s furniture company; besides it was going to be a large 50 page brochure so it would be almost like billing for web design work. I had my team draft up a proposal and send it out to the prospect. Almost immediately, the guy signs it and returns it to me with an email saying everything looks great and he was happy with the quoted price. This was very odd given how quick he returned it back to me, and plus my proposal software tells me how long a prospect spends on each page, and this guy basically just jumped to the signature page.

It didn’t take me that long to realize that this was an dragged out and intricate graphic design scam that had been going on in the industry now for awhile. I luckily was able to look up his email and “furniture company’s name,” and realize this before I spent anymore time or resources entertaining this scammer. If you want to read more about the details of this, I made a separate post warning other’s about it here.

The gist of it is that these scammers are preying on vulnerable graphic design and web design businesses that look like they need the business, ie. those that are advertising on Yelp, in hopes that they can use a stolen credit card to overpay for services and then get the designer to send them back the thousands of dollars worth of the over payment.

I was beyond pissed off at this point. I was literally paying Yelp $15 per click to put my company in these scammers cross-hairs. To make matters even worse, I was still getting more clicks on my ad for people advertising the fake prescription drug sites. It had only been one week since I started the ad campaign and I was ready to pull the plug. The sales rep was a pretty nice guy so I figured he would be shocked at these results and understand that my ad spend needed to be adjusted for these fraudulent clicks.

Yelp Advertising Customer Service

I emailed the Yelp advertising sales rep that had signed me up and told him that we needed to talk immediately about what was going on with my campaign. I thought to myself “they surely would like to know that their advertising program is being taken advantage of by these scammers,” since this obviously isn’t going to be good for Yelp’s goal of providing a valuable advertising experience.

I get the sales guy on the phone and he is also shocked to hear my findings. He totally understands my frustation and says that surely they would do something to fix the issue, but the only problem is that he isn’t authorized to credit the account. So he tells me that he’s going to transfer me to the department that can give me the credit. I get transferred over to another woman who asks how she can help and I go into the full story in complete detail. After I explain everything she tells me “oh sorry, he transferred you to the wrong department, I’ll transfter you over to the correct one now.”

“Isn’t this always the case with customer service departments”, I sighed.

The second woman get’s on the line and I go over the entire situation yet again. After I finish telling her the whole deal, she makes a canned remark about “how the Yelp advertising program is an investment in your business and how I knew about the risks when I signed up.” Somewhat in disbelief, I ask her if she listened at all to what I just told her, as I would think she would like to know how the Yelp advertising platform is being compromised by scammers. She then snaps back at me stating she did hear me and that if I understood what cost per click advertising meant. I told her that I have had ten years of paid advertising experience and I surely knew all about cost per click advertising. She again replies with an attitude from hell, regurgitating what she had previously said about how it’s an investment and that I should know that.

At this point I felt like I was talking to a child and that the conversation was clearly going nowhere, so I kindly asked her if I could speak to her supervisor or any superior that could actually help me out. Almost instantly she said “no I can’t transfer you to my supervisor or any superior.” Now I am in total disbelief that this is actually happening. Here I am as a new paying customer, that’s only one week into Yelp’s advertising service, contacting customer service about a major issue that’s compromising their advertising network, and she’s playing games with me rather than trying to help out.

I say to her “what do you mean you can’t tranfer me to your supervisor?” I tell her I have never heard any company just straight up tell you no when you ask to talk to a manger. She then says that’s just how it is at Yelp. I came back and told her “you’re lying to me, why won’t you transfer me to a superior or a higher tier of service?” This back and forth keeps going on until she finally says “well I can get my manager to call you back in 24 to 48 hrs,” to which I replied “are you kidding me?”

This entire conversation was giving me a headache and definitely more problems than resolutions. I then ask her for her name and she mumbles something very quickly. I laughed and said you’re going to have to say that again because you’re not saying it clear, to which she replies “I don’t need to give you my name!” Even more in disbelief that this entire thing was happening, I say “wow, alright then, well give me your employee id or email.” She again says “no, I can’t give you that information.” I then bluntly asked her why she was being so shady and why she couldn’t give me anything to document that this call actually happened. Shockingly, she then says “I don’t feel comfortable givign out my information when you have an aggresive tone.” Oh boy, I thought to myself, this lady is now using every lie in the book to hide the fact that she is incapable of doing her job. I was abosolutely livid now that she tried to play this “you’re being aggressive” card when I was the more civilizxed one throughout the entire conversation. “Really, aggressive? Is that what your excuse is now for not transferring me to your supervisor?” I say back to her. She then tells me that she’s ending the call now and that I’ll hear from someone in the next day or two.”

And click goes the phone.

I literally have never been in more disbelief; like did that really just happen.

Is this how Yelp handles customer service?

Does Yelp train these people to deflect customer concerns about how their advertising program is riddled with click fraud?

It really seems like they do after this call.

A day passes and I unexpectedly get a call from a Chicago area code that I don’t have saved. I answer it and sure enough it’s the Yelp customer service manager calling me back. I was actually relieved thinking that he could provide some resolution to the issue, and I went over the whole thing again about how my clicks were all from these scammers.

Despite me going into full detail yet again of my experience with the advertising program, he shifts the topic back to the conversation I had with the rude customer service lady. “Yea I listened to the conversation and she wasn’t lying about how she couldn’t transfer you over to me or give you any information,” he boldly exclaimed. I said “Ok, well if you listened to the conversation then you clearly should understand that she provided no help, had an attitude problem, and then lied about me being aggressive just to hang up on me and end the conversation.”

He then tries to say that I was out of line and “named called,” which is total bs. I asked him what name calling and he said “well I can’t repeat that on the phone”, “but what I am gong to do now is cancel your advertising account because we don’t allow people to talk like that to our customer service.”

Oh how convenient.

“So let me get this straight, I call about a concern and I get no help, and now you guys are going to pull my account under made up reasons?” I say back to him.

He keeps insisting his decision to pull my account isn’t based off my concerns with the program, but some made up reason he cooked up with the girl he manages. Who knows why he’s protecting her, maybe it’s his girlfriend or something. I really could care less, but what’s shocking is the fact that the main concern I had about their advertising network being flooded with scammers was never even discussed.

This leads me to believe that Yelp knows that their advertising platform is riddled with these issues, and they don’t want anyone to bring them to light. So Yelp must be training their customer service agents to deflect and deny anything wrong is going on, and in my case they literally pulled my account because I brought this issue up!

Here is the email I got from “Michael H.” the Yelp customer service manager:

Yes, Michael H., I am sure you do appreciate my business. Oh and what is that? You’re now going to process a final bill for me? Oh Michael H., how thoughtful of you to now do some actual work. Give me a break!

This guy really has the audacity to shoot me this canned response back after providing no real help. Of course I get no response back with I replied to this email.

So Is Yelp Advertising Worth It?

If you read everything I went through above and still think advertising with Yelp is a good idea, then you are a brave person!

In short, NO YELP ADVERTISING IS NOT WORTH IT. Unless you like throwing money out of the window, being treated like you’re the one in the wrong, or just straight up like being lied to, then I wouldn’t advertise on Yelp.

There are much better options available for running effective pay per click advertising campaigns that provide better results and save you money without the headache.

Final Thoughts

After going through this whole process, I am just glad that I didn’t waste anymore money with Yelp advertising and found out how bad the platform was within the first week. I actually just logged into my account and I am yet again shocked. It seems as they are now sticking me with a bill that comes out to well over the $15/day budget that I had agreed to. I am somehow not that surprised as Yelp advertising has been an overall shady process.

Here is the final bill they are claiming I owe:

As you can see, the CPC is now coming out to $27.97, which gives me a per day cost of $55.94 for 8/1, 82, and 8/6; and $27.97/day for 8/3 and 8/8.

I am not entirely sure why Yelp would falsely charge me for more than I agreed to, but the first thing that comes to mind is that they are probably banking on me not paying it so they figure they can inflate the bill and get more money when they sell it to a collections company. This is really the only reason I could see them doing this. It’s really sad for Yelp, a company that is built around displaying the reputation of other companies, going to these low measures to try and make money off of innocent businesses.

I am fortunate enough to have a great legal department, so I can handle situations like these when they arise, but it definitely isn’t right for Yelp to do this to any business that is paying them good money in hopes of them running a ethical advertising program.

I hope that this post helps anyone out there who is on the fence about advertising on Yelp. Feel free to share this post to help prevent Yelp from doing this to anybody else.