24 Apr How does a Yelp Agency Partnership Benefit the Restaurant?

Coming from a restaurant industry background, we all know Yelp is not always our favorite. From the Karen reviews to the sometimes annoying calls from sales reps. This, of course, made us hesitant to start advertising on Yelp for our restaurant clients. However, after experimenting with running ads on Yelp for a few of our restaurants, we had some amazing results that led to a direct and provable sales increase for our clients.

Embark Marketing has a Yelp Agency Partnership with the platform, which gives our restaurants and bars access to additional tools and tracking. With these analytics, we found that Yelp can become a powerful marketing tool that drives sales, foot traffic, & brand recognition for your business with trackable data & customer journey statistics that provide insight into your customers’ habits and trends. Below we discuss the benefits, features, & advantages of advertising on Yelp through a certified Yelp Agency Partner such as Embark Marketing.

Not Just Another Review Platform

Yelp is used by millions of people each year to help decide where to eat. The numerous reviews can either entice readers or serve as red flags to steer clear. As marketers, we recognize the power of harnessing this platform & putting the best food forward for our clients. Additionally, the advantage of advertising to an already captive audience is a major plus for restaurants. Potential customers are already looking in a specific area & unlike most businesses nowadays, restaurants still have to rely on foot traffic & physical location to service their customers. Even with the rise in takeout & delivery services, location is still the #1 factor when it comes to choosing where to eat. From this perspective, we can see the true potential of Yelp for a food and beverage business.

In order to take advantage of this, we now encourage our clients to go above and beyond on the Yelp platform. Utilizing our agency partnership, several of our clients have seen major ROI on ad spend due to the data only available to ad agencies.

Stats About Yelp

• 519 Million searches for the term “Restaurant” in 2019
• The average user visits a restaurant within 24 hours of seeing an ad on Yelp
• User data tracking ensures the accuracy of numbers reported for store visits & consumer actions for business owners

What Do Restaurants Get From A Yelp Agency Partnership?

There are several features on Yelp that are only available to those who have partnered with an ad agency. Restaurants that partner with us can benefit from:

Front Facing Features:

• Control of Displayed Content
• Video For Slideshow
• Business Highlights
• A Call To Action Button
• Competitor Ad Removal

Internal Features:

• Extensive Analytical Data
• Yelp Storefront

Control of Content

With any free Yelp profile, you are at the mercy of your customers to showcase the best your business has to offer. However, with an agency partnership, you can control the images displayed across the top of your profile, called your slideshow. In conjunction with professional photography, this ensures customers see your dishes & space in all their glory instead of a dimly lit parking lot or car interior. Additionally, this is a great way to promote new menu items, push those dishes with the highest ROI or “wow factor”, or show off a dish that is unique to your business. In addition, the partnership affords the opportunity to display a short video for customers to see your restaurant in action & further entice them to stop by. 

Highlights, CTA’s, & Removing Competitors

Highlights are an easy way to quickly display what your restaurant is about. From vegetarian dishes to fine dining to a veteran-owned designation, highlights are a way to identify key aspects of your business to potential customers to help them make their decision about dining with you. In the example below, users can quickly identify that this restaurant offers both Halal & Vegetarian dining options as well as a kid-friendly menu, late-night hours, a casual vibe, and catering services without having to look at their website or menu. This aids in decision making and highlights specific aspects that diners look for when choosing their next meal.

Along with Highlights, a Call To Action (CTA) button is available for Agency Partners that allows restaurants to drive certain actions toward their business. This can be utilized to push sales of online orders or encourage diners to book reservations online & is a powerful tool in its own right to compel users to interact with your business and make that dining decision quickly.

As with most things online, users can be easily distracted by irrelevant content which is why it is important to remove competitor advertising from your Yelp page. If a diner is already interested in your restaurant enough to be on your page, you do not want them to click away to the competition. Below we see examples of a Yelp business page without an enhanced profile versus one with an enhanced profile.

Yelp Advertising & Trackability

Online advertising is a must have for any business in the 21st century. Yelp ads allow restaurants to target a radius around their location as well as customize aspects such as the text shown, image used, & keywords that will attract diners. Unlike traditional advertising, the ability to track each ad dollar & ad effectiveness ensures you are getting the most bang for your buck. 

In addition to the features on your Yelp profile page, an Agency Partnership provides extensive tracking for advertising dollars and user data. Being able to track performance through ad impressions, ad clicks, & page interactions means we are able to measure a customer’s journey with your business. Utilizing this data, we can ensure your budget is being used to its fullest potential and adjust ineffective ads on the fly. With the use of keywords, we can further target specific subsects to attract diners who have a higher potential of picking your establishment over others. Again, we can use the example of a vegetarian diner for this example of subset targeting.

Yelp Storefront

A truly formidable tracking tool, Yelp Storefront is an Agency Partnership exclusive that tracks a customer’s physical journey in addition to their online one. With Storefront, restauranteurs can see the true ROI of their advertising investment as it tracks the user from when they click on your ad or business page to when they physically walk into your restaurant. This can be further broken down by new customers & return customers as well as the frequency of return visits. By using the average ticket price per person of your establishment & the number of store visits that occurred in a given period, we are able to provide an estimated revenue exclusively from the Yelp Ad spend. Given that the majority of diners are usually accompanied by at least one additional person, it can be said that these estimations for ROI could be doubled for the average ticket price.

We take a more in depth look into this feature below with our client, The Hayden, over the 4th Quarter of 2023.

The Power in the Data

With our Agency Partnership, we have access to extensive data for our clients in order to assess the effectiveness of ad spend & ensure client satisfaction. With the Yelp Store Visits for The Hayden, we were able to calculate ROI based on projected revenue driven from Yelp Ads as well as average ticket price & number of visits per month. Below, we see the breakdown over a three month span, including snippets such as new customer percentage & number of visits within 24 hours of viewing the ad.

As we can see from the data, October & November had the same ad budget of $575. However, October’s ROI ($7,775) is significantly lower than those for November ($17,925) by 10K. Ticket prices stayed the same for both months, but store visits doubled, meaning that the ad had a far more lucrative Cost Per Click (CPC) for November. This is attributable to our efforts to maximize the effectiveness of the ad by utilizing the data acquired during October & applying it to the ad for November. 

The Results

Additionally from the data, we can see that in December we saw an increase in both store visits & the number of new customers. We were also given a slightly increased ad budget at $727 which did contribute to the increased numbers. However, results from December outshine both October & November significantly with an astounding ROI increase of $32,422.94 attributable to our further refinement of ad distribution. Again, is it important to remember that diners are usually not alone when dining out & actual ROI could be much higher than these estimations. Below we can see a visual representation of these numbers for The Hayden for the 4th Quarter of 2023.

Conclusion

As a restaurant owner, it is imperative to utilize the resources available to stay ahead of the competition. By partnering with an Ad Agency, significant strides can be made to bring in more hungry diners. For a small monthly marketing investment on Yelp, restauranteurs can harness the power of this platform to drive sales, foot traffic, & brand awareness to millions of locals & tourists. As we can see from the above 4th Quarter data, this partnership resulted in thousands in extra revenue & real results for this eatery. 

Curious about how Embark Marketing can assist you with online advertising & marketing? Contact us today for a free consultation on what we can do for your food & beverage business.