Around the Net
Yelp Releasing 'Revenue Estimator' For Small Businesses
- TechCrunch, Tuesday, March 26, 2013 11:44 AM
Yelp is rolling out a feature that it claims can quantify the value it provides small businesses. “It helps business owners understand the impact that Yelp is already having on their revenue,” TechCrunch reports, citing comments from a Yelp spokesperson. Also, “It gives them a baseline from which to judge the success of their advertising campaigns.” To make its estimates, Yelp is apparently separating customer leads from page views.
Yelp's Revenue Estimator seems to be a little misleading. They simply take the number of people that had any contact what-so-ever with your listing and count it as a "Customer Lead" For example, directions, click to your website, post a photo and it counts as a "Lead". They then take some number they estimate to be a value to that lead and multiply it to give you a "Revenue Estimate". In the case of my photo studio they estimate that each "lead" is worth $384.00. They say in the last 12 months I had 69 leads with a Revenue Estimate of $23,808.00! I've had an ad campaign with them for a couple of months. The last 30 days I have only received 7 of what they refer to as "Leads" or an estimated revenue of $2,688.00.
HERE'S THE PROBLEM: I haven't received a single solitary customer in the last 60 days that I began my campaign with them that I can attribute to finding me on Yelp. And we grill our customers pretty good on how they found us. Here's the real revenue estimate: I spent $350.00 on a Yelp Campaign, I supposedly got 7 leads (according to them!). That cost me $50.00 per lead and resulted in not a single phone call or web inquiry. BOTTOM LINE: Yelp has some pretty slick salespeople but I'm having a hard time finding someone happy with advertising with them, especially myself.