YouTube video by Phil Risher (Flash Consulting) explaining how local service businesses can evaluate Yelp advertising ROI. Risher walks through extracting lead counts from the Yelp business dashboard (calls, website visits, messages, call-to-action clicks), applies estimated conversion rates to convert those into booked jobs, calculates cost-per-job and total revenue using average ticket values, and interprets ROI benchmarks (≈10x excellent, 5x good, 3x expected). He emphasizes that Yelp’s raw metrics overcount true leads (website visits/messages aren’t always contactable) and offers agency help for account analysis.
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If you're having trouble evaluating your Yelp marketing budget and if it's actually generating leads for you or how you're going to pull some type of return on investment off this, in this video, I'm going to explain how you can look at these numbers and decide if it's working or not. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We partner with local service businesses. We help them increase sales and keep their schedules full. And in this video, I'm going to show you our process for evaluating Yelp spend. Now, Yelp people have a love hate relationship with them. Some people are mad at them because they scrubbed their reviews, all that kind of stuff. I totally get it. I was the director of sales at a local service business and it frustrated me really, really bad. And another thing that really frustrates me is that they count website visits and messages as leads. And so in this video, I'm going to kind of break down how to evaluate these numbers. All right, so if you have never been to your back end of Yelp, you can go to biz.yelp.com you can pull up this. If you've never seen this before, you just go to your Yelp ads, you go down to your leads, and then instead of ads versus organic, you just break down by type. And it's going to break it down here. And so effectively what we do is we look at these numbers and we say, what's the probability of these closures going from a call into a booking? And, and we know these numbers based off of what we see in the market and also a lot of studies that have been done. So I'm going to kind of walk you through these. So let's say we're going to get some calls. I'm just going to do this on the fly. Let's make this big. All right, so for calls, we know that calls should book at 42%. Let's just say 40% to make it easy. So if you, in April, this company got 20 leads. So 40%. 20. We're gonna go like this. 20 times 0.4. So let's say they got eight jobs from this. Now there is, obviously, if you have a CRM client relationship manager, then you can go in and check your lead sources. However, a lot of times, right, sometimes people call their business, it's not going to track your lead source. They may go online, they may go on Google you. It might go all over the place. What we found is that this way is at least going to give you like, how many leads did you. I mean, how many jobs did you actually get from this? And so you know your business better. Let's say you convert 30% of calls into actual jobs booked. Right? So you can figure out these numbers, but this is what we do. Website visitors. 94. If you've seen videos before, our goal is to convert website visitors at 10%. And again, you would know for your business. We made videos on how to do that, but they got 92. So let's say that's nine jobs. They got messages. Now, messages on Yelp are hit or miss. What we found with Yelp messages is that they convert at around 5 to 10%. Specifically for this business, we're going to put 5%. And you can see they got a lot of yelp messages. So 82. All right, let's see. What is this 82 they got? Let's say that's four jobs. All right? Their call to action is schedule now, so it literally goes to online scheduling. So this one is pretty high. We usually see for them, it's about 70%. Right. If people are ready to schedule now, a lot of times they go through that. So they had 7. 7 times 0.7. Okay, so they got five jobs. All right, cool. So once you get this, you kind of know. Okay, well, of these leads that they generated for me, I got 8, 9, 4, 5. So that's 9. That's 18. That's 18. 8. That's 26. So let's slide this up a little bit. So in total, that should be 26 jobs. Let's say I spent 1500 dollars in Yelp. All right, so now we can. We can say I got $1500, which got me 26 jobs, which cost me $57 a job. Okay, $57 per job. And the last thing that we can say is our average ticket. So our average ticket here is about 500 bucks. So 26 times 500. $13,000, let's say 13k. Okay. So we can say we spent $1500 and that $1500 created $13,000, supposedly. And so that's going to be 12% of what we spent. We try to stay around, like, 10% of the job into marketing. So that's pretty good. And then we can see this is greater, a little under 10 times the return. And we made videos about how to evaluate that. But 10 times your return is amazing results. Five times is good, and then three times is what you would expect. So effectively, this is how we would try to pull some type of an roi. What I would stress strongly to you is don't just take these leads. On face value of 203 leads, it's not leads, it's calls. Website visits, message, call to action, clicks. Just because someone goes to your website doesn't mean that's a lead. Just because someone messages you, it does mean it's a lead. But in Yelp, in my opinion, it doesn't count as a Truly because they don't give you their name, they don't give you their phone number, they don't give you their email address. All they do is create some type of message. So it's not a Truly that you can actually follow up on. They have the upper hand on everything. So that's our process for evaluating Yelp. If you have questions or you want us to do an analysis of your Yelp account or you're looking to grow your local service business, that's what we do. Put a link down below. Love to talk with you. If not, hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing local service businesses and we'll see you in the next video.
