Your Yelp Message Center May Be Costing You Leads

When it comes to gen­er­at­ing leads, my clients tend to have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with Yelp (depend­ing on their loca­tion and over­all review rat­ing, some do get quite a few!).  Lead analy­sis is one of the ser­vices I offer. This past fall, I began to notice some­thing inter­est­ing as I took a clos­er look at the leads a par­tic­u­lar client was gen­er­at­ing from Yelp. They were receiv­ing quite a few (that’s promis­ing, right?), but after tak­ing an even deep­er dive I dis­cov­ered that the actu­al clos­ing rate was way below their aver­age. With the help of my client, we found a poten­tial prob­lem: Yelp Mes­sen­ger. We dis­cov­ered that when a con­sumer clicks to mes­sage a com­pa­ny on Yelp and then fills out a request for ser­vice, Yelp auto-checks 3 oth­er relat­ed ser­vice providers to get bids from as well!  In fact, the Yelp user can select up to 10 with­in sec­onds. I think most con­sumers will nev­er uncheck (or even notice!) the oth­er box­es, and will sim­ply hit the ​“Request Quotes” but­ton. There are sev­er­al prob­lems with this system: 

• It encour­ages every con­sumer to get a min­i­mum of 4 bids. I do not think that every­one these days has the time to get 4+ esti­mates for work. If they do, let them do their own research and decide who those bids should come from (and when).
• Even if you are a paid adver­tis­er on Yelp, the sys­tem works the same way.
• Yelp does­n’t play favorites when they serve up oth­er ser­vice providers — it is a ran­dom selec­tion. This ben­e­fits Yelp’s sales team by allow­ing them to use that data when call­ing on con­trac­tors who are not adver­tis­ing with them, show­ing them their pro­file is get­ting viewed!

Here is the Cur­rent Solution

If you just need leads, do noth­ing. Leave the mes­sen­ger on. You’ll prob­a­bly just deal with at least 3 – 4 oth­er con­trac­tors when you bid a project, mak­ing your bid a tougher sell. For the rest of you, turn off your mes­sage cen­ter and send con­sumers to your web­site to con­tact you. I have reached out to my Yelp reps and expressed my con­cern mul­ti­ple times. I have actu­al­ly got­ten a few of them to under­stand my con­cern and agree that it is not the best. I’ve heard rumors of changes com­ing! Until those changes are made, just turn off mes­sag­ing with­in the ​“Inbox” set­tings of your busi­ness account.