Yelp boosts ad offerings for national and multi-location businesses

Dive Brief:

Yelp has introduced a suite of new ad services designed to help national and multi-location businesses generate and manage high-intent leads, according to a company announcement.
Among the offerings is the expansion of its Request a Quote for Brands solution to multi-location businesses. Additional features, including the Yelp Guaranteed program and Verified License and Portfolio tools are also now available to national services businesses.
The enhancements also include the expansion of Yelp’s Spotlight Ads video placements and Yelp Audiences solution, as well as a new cookieless measurement tool. Yelp’s move marks its latest attempt to shore up additional advertiser incentives.

Dive Insight:

Introduced in 2016, Yelp’s Request a Quote feature enables consumers to request quotes from local service providers, which, in turn, helps those businesses generate relevant leads more easily. In its first-quarter earnings announcement, Yelp noted that its Request a Quote projects increased 20% year over year, reflecting the company’s efforts to use paid search to its advantage. With such growth, it makes sense that Yelp would want to expand these products to businesses with a national scope and multiple locations.

The enhanced Request a Quote feature includes a new Leads API that will help brands seamlessly manage leads across their locations, eliminating the need to manually manage leads from multiple Yelp pages. In addition, Yelp is extending its guaranteed customer satisfaction program, which offers up to $2,500 back if something goes wrong with a project, to national services businesses using Request a Quote. National services businesses will also be eligible to participate in a verified license program and Portfolio feature that help customers find businesses with trade licenses and peruse photo collections of completed projects.

“Request a Quote is one of our most popular products for local services businesses, and we’re excited to expand this lead-generating product to national brands,” said Craig Saldanha, chief product officer at Yelp, in a statement.

Other enhancements to Yelp’s advertising services include expanded video placements for its Spotlight Ads programs to enable video to appear in a business’s photo grid. The Yelp Audiences platform, which allows non-location based advertisers to reach Yelp’s audience when they are preparing to make a purchase, has been expanded to audio and connected TV platforms.

Yelp also introduced a new conversion API offering brands a more accurate way to measure the impact of Yelp Ads. The feature allows advertisers to analyze any conversion from lead to transaction to measure accurately without relying on cookies.

These developments represent the latest example of how Yelp is attempting to shore up additional advertiser incentive. The new features come just months after Yelp introduced a series of updates and features in its spring product release. That release included a new API that helps integrate Yelp’s content into third-party platforms and an artificial intelligence-powered conversational assistant, a move that sees Yelp join a long list of those looking to tap into the buzzy AI landscape.