I am often asked how much yelp advertising costs personal injury lawyers or if Yelp drives traffic to personal injury law firm websites.
Yelp has pretty much secured its spot as the #1 place to leave reviews online. While it was and still is used primarily to review restaurants, it is also a very popular place to review everything else including personal injury law firms. Look at any attorneys profile and you will likely see more reviews from Yelp than you will from AVVO.
Under Yelp’s current model you pay for impressions. Generally, I am against against paying for impressions but Yelp is an exception simply due to the low bounce rate provided when people actually do click through from Yelp to your website. This all comes down to the cost per lead or potential cost per lead and ROI. In many industries Yelp ads are not worth it but if you can drop a couple hundred a month on Yelp and possibly get a great case from it one day it could be worth the gamble.
Yelp Views
In this case, we’ve set up Yelp ads in a city of about 500,000 people. Our current budget is $350/mo for 500 impressions. We’re using Yelp’s “Review Ads” and “Specialty Ads” in this particular campaign and what we actually receive is around 175 impressions each month.
Here’s a screenshot of impressions over the last 12 months:
Forget impressions, how many actions were there?
Ok, now you are asking the right questions. Impressions are useless unless someone clicks the ad, or better yet, calls you to tell you about their injury.
In the month of March 2016 on the campaign above the following actions were taken based on 204 impressions:
– 16 Yelpers clicked through to the website
– 5 Yelpers clicked to call
Other variables
I should note that the attorney doing this advertising is a very well respected attorney with a great rating already. Although, people have short attention spans online. A star rating may be enough to capture someone’s attention, rather than the actual review count. People see 5 stars and they’re all in- doesn’t matter if it is 1 week’s worth of ratings or ratings for the last 20 years. Sad but true.
What is the conversion rate?
Of the Yelpers who clicked through to the website, I am unsure of how many called. Unfortunately, call tracking was not in place however on previous test runs on other law firms I am fairly confident stating that out of all 200 impressions about 10 people called, which is a 5% conversion rate. There are other studies online that match up closely to this as well. While I do not have definitive evidence, I am not aware of any of the calls which resulted in a case.
Yelp CPC Bids
Not included in this little article is Yelp cost per click. It has been a while since I ran this for a client but if I recall correctly in a major city you’re looking at around $10-$20 per click for personal injury related ads.
Recap
An investment in PPC will result in more calls more quickly for the short term.
Content absolutely results in far more web traffic and it is significantly more relevant.
If you want to be everywhere and have the budget to do so I do recommend advertising on Yelp. In a town of 500k people you could likely skate by with a $200/mo budget.
If you’re not sure how Yelp ads work, install the app on your phone! It is a wonderful app. Now go ahead and look up Pizza Hut. See the ads for Domino’s? That is one way ads work on Yelp.
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