Does Yelp advertising drive new clients to your business?
Yes and no. Although people love to eat and drink and shop, I’m going to guess that the quality of their dining experience and the variety of selection is probably the two most important factors that hold customers back from making a dinner-of-peas decision and committing to a long-term purchase. But the web is full of reviews and ratings, and those ratings don’t necessarily reflect reality – or the reality that the Yelp crew sees! I don’t know, maybe they were being polite and not telling the truth on this one. I’m not a salesperson, but I have to wonder what they’re being rated for… I’ve asked some of my friends who are (yelp agents) about this and their first response is that the “ratings are accurate but they don’t represent what the restaurant really is like.”
So what? They’re ratings – and that’s pretty darn good. But the reality might not be as rated. The reality is, they might include all the wrong people in the rating. Not the best type of people to spend time with, to say the least. Now, the Yelp ratings themselves are a reflection of the Yelp staff. In other words, there are very few reviews on Yelp from regular customers. And the ones that are left are from Yelpers who have been very kind and submitted left reviews as neutral savants – and the ratings reflect that.
Also, I am not a ratings person, but I’m guessing this is a major factor in how Yelpers rate restaurants. They’ll go see a restaurant, leave a review and then wait for the next one to come out, and then the next one, and then the next one until they get to the point where they can’t go anymore. And I’m guessing that some of these people are not exactly going to be very interested in eating or drinking anything. Or maybe they have. Maybe their spouse ordered something and that review influenced the Yelper to order something – and then their review influenced the Yelper to order something else. I am not qualified to discuss how ratings are determined, but I am qualified to point out that there’s an inherent bias in this stuff.
And if there is, it’s against all of us – the people who rate and review and rate and review and the Yelp people who make the money that keep those ratings going. The ratings represent the views of an anonymous majority of Yelpers who’ve never had anything but the best of the restaurants and so they put it on the site, without question. And we, the Yelp people, sometimes put a positive review on a restaurant or event only because the review was written by someone who has had to eat at that restaurant or drink that wine. It’s a circular process.
I would say that the most valuable service Yelp offers is helping to finance local independent restaurants. By that I mean the places in town that have survived on word of mouth by providing a venue for customers to get together. If these restaurants didn’t exist, someone else would. The problem is finding the venues.
But you need money to survive. That’s why we need ratings. To make money on the Internet. Which is also a problem.
Local Value can help you with your Yelp questions and is a Certified Yelp Advertiser. 
