Are you buying Yelp ads? Be VERY careful, you might be generating leads for your competitors.
Sound ridiculous?
We just recorded a short video that explains why your Yelp budget may actually be benefiting your competitors as much as, or more, than it benefits you:
As seen in the above video, when a potential customer clicks “Request a Quote,” a contact form pops up, where they can email your business directly on Yelp. GREAT!
The problem is that by default, Yelp also emails the same request for a quote to at least 3 of your competitors, and up to 10 competitors, if certain boxes are selected.
Pretty crazy, right?
Yelp takes money for advertising your business (on a pay-per-click basis, with INCREDIBLY high prices), generates a lead (YES!), then proceeds to send that lead’s message to your competitors. Are you kidding me?
While Yelp is free to do what they want with their site, I’d think this critical detail is lost on many of their unsophisticated advertisers, and it just seems downright unethical.
After talking to one such person who provided his phone number in the message, he had never heard of my business, and likely didn’t realize the box to contact other web designers had been checked by default.
This isn’t a good experience for users, and it is a giant waste of time and money for advertisers.
