Caitlin: Welcome to our webinar today: better marketing starts with better audiences. We’re going to discuss our off-platform solution called Yelp Audiences. My name’s Caitlin Erickson. I’m a senior manager of Enterprise Marketing here at Yelp. I’ve been with the company for 10 years in a number of different sales and marketing roles. Currently, my role entails launching a number of various campaigns across channels like LinkedIn, email, et cetera. I also work on some of our branding efforts and content marketing, like hosting webinars just like this one, as well as oversee our sales development team who helps us convert all of our great opportunities into sales opportunities. But ultimately, my job here is to connect our great marketers of our multi-location businesses with our multi-location account team specialists.
And I am very excited to walk you through our webinar today. So we’re going to do about 20 to 30 minutes worth of content, and then we will have time for about 10 to 15 minutes of Q&A at the end. So think about your questions and jot them down along the way. For our content today, we’re going to first spend a minute or two just getting aligned on some of the problems that we all face as marketers when running digital campaigns. Then we’ll dig into the better audience that’s out there, our better audience through Yelp Audiences, and we’ll touch on Yelp Audiences and go through an overview of what that product is. And then we’ll wrap up with how to launch a successful campaign on Yelp Audiences by taking a look at other real live campaigns that we run. And then as I mentioned, we’ll wrap up with Q&A.
But before we get started, I just want to say thank you so much for sharing this time with us. We know how valuable that lunch hour is. So extra special thank you for forwarding some of that time to be with us. And if you didn’t know, or as a reminder, the first 100 to join today will receive a $15 GrubHub gift card from us as a thank you for spending [inaudible 00:02:18] wondering if you won, we will get that GrubHub voucher to you by the end of the week if you were the first 100 to join. So keep an eye on your inbox.
So let’s dive in. I want to first, as I mentioned, start with aligning on some of the problems that we face as marketers in launching programmatic campaigns. There’s a host of issues that we all run into, I’m sure, but no matter what a level of experience you’ve had with running digital campaigns and programmatic campaigns, you’ve probably run into some level of frustration. You’ve probably looked like somebody on the screen at one point or another. And so let’s talk about some of those most common problems. There’s sort of three big ones from my point of view, we run into some limitations in website retargeting. We also run into some issues with lack of transparency in third party audiences and the super hot topic, consumer privacy concerns. Let’s dive in a little bit on each one of these.
First off, let’s dive into some website retargeting limitations. Website retargeting is one of the most common and effective digital marketing tactics. So it’s not surprising if most of us are already doing this, but they do come with a couple of challenges. You do need to rely on a couple of support teams, your web team to ensure that your pixels are up and updated and maintained, and your marketing team to drive visitors to your website. And even if you’re doing both of those really well, you’re going to run into a limitation at a certain point where you’ve reached a ceiling of the number of visitors you have on your website that you can retarget. And what’s more too is if you think about how consumers are using the internet to find information on businesses today, it doesn’t always land in your website. Consumers are often looking at different listings, your Facebook page, your Yelp listing.
Sometimes we don’t even have to leave Google to get all the information that we need. And so as consumers interact like that more, we run into an issue where we’re missing a big chunk of audience that’s in market for our solution that didn’t quite reach our website. And therefore, if we stop at just website retargeting, we’ve reached a limitation where we’re not reaching some of those really great perspective customers. So at that point, you’re probably starting to look for third party audiences. You’re digging around with some DSPs and looking at some of the options, taking a look at some of the personas out there. And you probably quickly realize at that point that there’s a lack of transparency in really understanding how these third party audiences are composed and put together.
And I’m sure you’ve run into this personally, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen ads where I go, “why am I seeing this ad? Why am I getting an ad for dog food when I don’t have a dog? It doesn’t quite make sense.” Well, when that happens, it’s usually a result of some obscurity in these third party audiences. This marketer probably found a persona, a third party audience of dog lovers, but didn’t quite have that transparency into what signals created that bucket. And so as the person who doesn’t have the dog getting the dog food ad [inaudible 00:05:43] was incorrectly added into that audience and then targeted with an irrelevant ad. And so we run into some of these not accurate or stale audiences because of the obscurity.
And then also we want to make sure that we’re being conscious of consumer privacy, another big issue we face when running digital campaigns. Just like I mentioned with the dog food ad, you’ve probably experienced something on the opposite side too, where you saw an ad and you go, “wow, this is just really creepy, right? How do they know my grandmother’s shoe size and my son’s middle name and the address of the house I lived in when I was four?” It makes you feel like, “whoa, all right, this is a little creepy, maybe a little too much.” And you want to make sure that you’re keeping consumer privacy top of mind. Because at the end of the day, privacy is very important to consumers. And so it has to be very important to marketers. We want to find a way to find that third party audience, not in a black box, not with the lack of transparency, but at the same time we want to make sure we’re finding that audience without making that person feel like their privacy is being violated.
But if I’m being honest, I think if we’re all being honest, we kind of do want to be that close to our consumer. We kind of do want to stalk them a little bit so that we know we have an in-market audience and we know that it’s not stale and that’s hard to do. And so a lot of the times that turns into some demographic formula guesswork, where you’re trying to come up with the perfect recipe of demographics to nail down a third party audience of your own so that it’s not created in a black box, but you’re also protecting consumer privacy. And that’s hard. That formula is really hard as many of you know. So we’re here to take the guesswork out of that formula and we’re here to connect you to a better audience. We want to help you connect with people that are in market now and not in an obscure way. We want to make sure that it’s transparent, the signals that are creating this audience and help you go beyond that website limitation of only retargeting your website visitors.
And we do that with Yelp Audiences and connect you to the Yelp audience. And you’re probably asking, “okay, why is the Yelp audience actually a better audience?” So I want to share a little bit about why people are using Yelp to help answer that question. So first it’s important to know that we have two sides of users, we have consumers and we have business owners on the site. So 77 million unique monthly visitors are coming to our site looking for things they need. And 5.8 million business owners are logging into their accounts and managing their digital storefronts. On the consumer side, consumers come to Yelp to find what they need. So think about something you used Yelp for recently or might be using Yelp for soon.
It starts with a need. Maybe you needed lunch, maybe you needed to cure that really bad lingering toothache, or perhaps you needed to get your car to stop making a grinding noise every time you started it. Either way, you needed something. Additionally, you had the means to get what you needed. So if you needed lunch, you had $30 in your pocket. If you needed to cure the toothache or the car problems, you probably had dental insurance or car insurance. And regardless of what you needed, you also didn’t have somebody in mind. So you came undecided, you didn’t have the dentist that you’ve been going to for decades or a car mechanic that’s been your go-to. So you came to Yelp to help you decide who that was going to be. So you had something you needed, you had the means to get that need, you weren’t sure where, and you came to Yelp to help you answer that.
And that’s how all consumers are using Yelp. They’re coming with that need, the means to transact. And they’re undecided. In fact, 97% of people are making a purchase after they visit Yelp. And 85% of those searches are unbranded further proving that they’re coming without a business in mind. But that’s not the only reason why this is a better audience. Our audience is also very acclimate. The majority of our users are making over a $100,000 a year, which is actually 24% more likely than the average internet user to be in that bracket. And they want to be lifelong customers. They’re very loyal. 92% are looking for a business that they can return to and they love to advocate, they love to be vocal. 80% of them are sharing the businesses that they find with friends. So we’re talking about a consumer audience that is purchase ready needs what you can offer them and is undecided on where to go with disposable income, looking to be loyal and vocal about your business, sounds like a better audience.
But we can’t forget about our business owners. We have our whole other side of our users that we can target as well. 5.8 million business owners are logging into their business owner’s accounts and they’re managing their stores online. They’re updating their specialties, filling out their hours, telling us more about their business and what makes them unique, uploading photos, interacting with their customers and the feedback that their customers are leaving them. And what’s great about this as a marketer when you think about targeting this audience is that not only is this business owner audience there and you can splice and dice it between industries and business sizes, but you also know you’re reaching a business owner audience that truly cares about their reputation and growth. Otherwise, they would choose to just not spend the time working on their Yelp digital storefronts.
So we know now about this better audience that’s out there to connect you with. You’re probably asking, “all right, how do I get connected with them?” Yelp Audiences, so this is our newest off-platform product that connects you with that better audience. So I want to take you through a quick overview of exactly how that works. At a very high level, Yelp Audiences works by targeting users based on their activity on Yelp and help you connect with them across the web. So for example, let’s say we have somebody that’s searching for a department store. They know that they need a department store. So they’ve told us that they’ve got on Yelp and they’ve typed in department store. But let’s say they then end up on the New York Times because they’re reading the latest story, or maybe they go to ESPN to check the scores, they’ve traveled elsewhere across the web. While Macy’s, a department store can get their ad right in front of that person who has said they need a department store by placing that ad on the New York Times or ESPN, et cetera.
And what’s more is even non location businesses that can’t be on Yelp can put an ad in this place. Something like a Stitch Fix could also place an ad here on the New York Times in front of somebody who has said they need a department store. And in either situation, both Macy’s or Stitch Fix has the opportunity to direct this person who needs what they have to offer to their website. It could be a landing page for a sale or a way to transact online or for Macy’s, it could even be a way to just direct you to your nearest Macy’s. But either way, Macy’s and Stitch Fix get to do this by going beyond just their website retargeting. They’re able to have very clear signals. We know this person very specifically said they wanted a department store and we’re protecting consumer privacy as well.
And it’s all coming back to reaching that better audience and that better audience can be created for whatever it is that you can offer. So whatever searches are happening on Yelp, we can create a custom based audience that’s based around what your goals and needs are. And from there, our team works together to launch your campaign and then consistently and continuously observe and optimize that campaign as well. All the while we’re collecting a myriad of data to be able to share back with you insights about your campaign and consumers so that you can have it for future planning.
And that audience matching that our team helps you with can be based on a number of different factors. So on the consumer side, we can find an audience based off of their search activity, kind of looked at that example. We can also factor in things like geographic data or other behavior data on the site, like if you visited a lot of pages that have four dollar signs, for example, maybe you’re a luxury shopper. You can also add on third party filters like household income or age or other demographic filters to really narrow into that perfect audience. And very similarly on the business owner side, you can look at finding that perfect audience based on the industry that those business owners have told us they’re part of, their business size, other specialties that they’re adding. And again, we can add third party filters that are related to other firmographic data to help you narrow into that perfect audience.
So we know about the better audience, we know that Yelp Audiences can connect you to them, but where, I’m sure you’re asking where. “What kind of placements can I put out there?” So the great news is that Yelp Audiences supports all IAB standard placements for both display and video. And we also support Connected TV. And my most favorite and most exciting is our Yelp Dynamic Content Ads. And this is a unique ad placement that we’ve created that co-brands Yelp with your brand and your message while featuring local Yelp listings to direct that consumer to interact with you in a certain way. So you can see here IHOP and Minions paired up to put a message out there and have the opportunity to redirect users to local Yelp listings for theaters for nearby IHOPs.
And while these ad placements are out there performing and driving you towards your KPIs, we’re collecting all that data I mentioned. So we report on all your standard metrics for your campaigns, things that you would expect, your conversions, your CTR. We can even track store visits from these campaigns, but we’re also collecting additional insights to share with you as well. Things like where most of your conversions are happening or what else are your customers looking for, what else are they in market for so that you can use that in future campaign planning as well. So at this point we’ve walked through our better audience that’s out there for you to connect with. We’ve talked about our newest off platform solution and how Yelp Audiences works. And I want to wrap up with just a couple of examples of successful campaigns that have run through Yelp Audiences so that you can start to get a feel for how to build your own successful campaign.
So first I want to talk about a healthcare provider that worked with Yelp Audiences to accomplish a full funnel set of goals and hit all of those goals and ultimately drive a 10 to 1 return on ad spend. So this healthcare provider, think of somebody that’s, we’re going to keep them anonymous to protect their privacy. But think of your CityMD or your One Medical, Kaiser, but we’ll just call them Harry’s Healthcare. Harry’s Healthcare had awareness goals and lower funnel conversion goals and they wanted to accomplish them all and partner with Yelp Audiences to do that. They wanted to drive awareness during open enrollment, while most people probably have heard of them, they wanted to really drive home awareness during open enrollment when people were actively looking for doctors and healthcare providers. So they partnered with Yelp Audiences and ran a Connected TV campaign targeting Yelp users who have recently searched for a doctor.
And they got a very simple message out there during open enrollment to say we’re an option, we want to make sure that you know that. They were able to drive web visits under $7 from that campaign during open enrollment. And they knew they were reaching people who were actively searching for a doctor as well. And their lower funnel performed fabulously as well. They again, targeted the Yelp users that were searching for a doctor and they connected them through a display campaign with a very simple message, something along the lines of like ready for a new doctor and got those consumers that were searching for a doctor with that message to form fills and booked appointments online, ultimately driving a $35 CPA, which was well under their goal that was originally set at hundreds of dollars. And again, altogether this drove a return on ad spend of 10 to 1 for this healthcare provider.
And they were able to do it by going beyond that website retargeting limitations. They were able to see the clear signals and not feel like they had a black box or obscure audience. They knew they were reaching people that were searching for a doctor and they did it while keeping consumer privacy in mind. No one ever felt like their privacy was being violated. And while that is important across all industries, that is particularly important in healthcare. And so they were able to do that and see great results. And while I had to keep their campaign creative a secret to protect their privacy, I do want to share a couple of creative examples with you so that you can get a feel for what kind of creative performs well in these campaigns. So let’s take a look at FreshDirect. FreshDirect ran a campaign with beautiful imagery.
It’s vibrant, but it’s also not cluttered. And on top of that, they had a great call to action, very enticing, $50 off, who doesn’t want $50 off? And so with the vibrant and engaging imagery and the enticing call to action, they were able to influence purchases from this campaign. Another example we have is KitchenAid. This is an example of a campaign using the dynamic content ads to really boost the wow factor of the ad. KitchenAid kept their message simple and they were trying to get the word out about Women’s Place Wednesday an event for women led restaurants. But what they did to really boost this was they featured women owned restaurants on Yelp as part of their ad unit. Now, if you’re trying to reach women owned restaurants, featuring women owned restaurant Yelp listings is a great way to catch that attention.
And one last example I want to show you is Madison Reed. This is such a simple and clear creative example. Their value is so clearly stated, you can’t go, you can’t miss it. Your best hair color ever, their hair color is the best ever. And they’ve matched that with very great imagery. The vibrancy, but the simplicity of the imagery matches the message and to round it all out, the call to action is clear and simple as well. If you’re somebody who’s looking for a stylist and you want great hair color and you come across this ad, there is no doubt in your mind you can click the button and get scheduled right away. And that accomplishes the goal for both the consumer who needs that stylist and for Madison Reed who wants to get those booked appointments.
And hopefully you’re seeing with these handful of examples that simplicity and clarity is really a winning recipe when you’re matching it with a better audience. When you know that your audience is in market and looking for what you have to offer and you can get a clear simple message in front of them, you’re going to be able to crush your KPIs. So now hopefully I’ve gotten you pretty excited about Yelp Audiences and you’re probably saying, “okay, well what’s next? How do I do this? What’s my next move?” So we are going to start Q&A here in just a couple of minutes. So feel free to start adding questions into the Q&A if you’d like. I’m going to give you a couple of resources before we jump into that Q&A session. And also just as a heads up, keep an eye on your inbox. We will send out this recording for you later so that you can reference back to it. But the first resource I want to share with you, which will come with the recording as well in case you miss it today, is a campaign planner for a Yelp Audiences campaign.
If you take your phone out and you scan this QR code, you’ll be able to download our one page Yelp Audiences campaign planner. And this is just a really simple worksheet. If you can spend 30 minutes just filling this out, you’ll have such a great blueprint. We’ll get you connected with the account team. They’ll be able to use that information to match you with a great audience and get you up and running very quickly. So this is just a handy tool to make your life easier and help you get set up with your Yelp Audiences campaign. And once you do that, you’re going to want to book time with your account team. So this QR code is to get you set up and booked with somebody from our team.
Whether you’re ready to go through the campaign planner or maybe you just have a couple of questions that are lingering or maybe you want to talk a little bit more specifically about you and your business and what this might look like for you, whatever it is that you need help with, go ahead and use this QR code to book a time with our team. We’d be delighted to chat with you. And last but not least, I wanted to give you this QR code. So if you scan this, you’ll actually be able to register for our next webinar. Little shameless plug for what’s coming next. So the end of September, we’re going to be hosting another session on attribution. We all know that measuring the impact of your ads can be quite tricky sometimes, but we’ve really made that simple and yet robust so that you can effectively measure the impact of your ads. And we’re really excited to share a little bit more about what that looks like here at Yelp with you on September 27th.
So if you’re excited about that and you want to get an early seat, you can scan this QR code to do that. All right, so let’s jump into the Q&A. Let me go ahead and pull that up. Just give me a moment here. We’ll see what questions we have coming in. Okay, first question, can Yelp provide creative for the campaigns? We don’t provide creative services. No. We really focus our efforts around the audience and the audience matching and optimizing the targeting. And additionally, we’ve actually seen, like I’ve mentioned, very simple creative work. So we see a lot of other successful campaigns run creative that they have from elsewhere. And because you’re matching with such a better audience, it works really well. So we don’t offer creative services at this time. Let’s take a look. What else do we have here?
All right, is Yelp Audiences only a managed service? Yes, we offer just a managed services. And this is really to ensure that we maintain the privacy of our users. We want to be able to help you reach them based on these very clear signals, but we want to make sure that we’re keeping their privacy front and center. All right, what else do we have here? I’m seeing a question about lookalike audiences. So let me kind of just touch a little bit about lookalike audiences. So our programmatic partner, The Trade Desk, they do have lookalike audiences that are, it’s an out of the box solution. So that just allows you to, based on the campaign that you’re running with Yelp Audiences, allows you to extend your reach by finding very similar audiences that are elsewhere across the web. So there is an out-of-box solution for that through The Trade Desk that we can engage. We’re also testing something new called enhanced targeting, which can also help improve scale and performance as well.
So if you want to book some time with us, we can go into a little bit more detail on that with you if you’re interested in learning more. Hey, let’s see, what else do we have? See a question about reporting. What type of reporting do you provide on these ads? We offer all the standard type of reporting that you would think of, your CTR, your conversions, your impressions, et cetera, et cetera. So whatever you’re thinking of is your standard of reporting is probably included, but we also provide some of those additional insights that I mentioned as well because we want to equip you with even more. If you have, and I just want to sort of say this across all the questions as well. If you do have any specific like, “oh, I really need this, or well, my business is a little unique in this instance, could we do something here?” Please do book time with us and we’ll put those QR codes up just again in a minute. But book some time with us and we’d be happy to see what we can do on your own individual basis as well.
What is the cost of Yelp Audiences? Great question. The Yelp [inaudible 00:27:50] it’s based on a budget that you’re going to want to set. So you’re going to want to work with your account team based around your goals. It’s really hard for me to say this is the budget that you need to get this started. I’ve seen all kinds of campaigns from just a couple of thousand of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars based around the goals that you’re trying to hit. So there’s a very, very, very wide range in there, but we want you to get connected with the right budget and the right goals. So if you’re able and you have some time to connect with us, we’d love to give you a better, more specific answer on that.
Let’s see here. All right, so loving these questions everybody. Thank you. And I want to just take a minute too to say if we don’t get to your question today, we will make sure that if you submitted it without checking the anonymous button, we will absolutely get back to you and get your question answered. So thanks, keep them coming. But if we don’t get to yours, don’t worry, we’ll make sure that we get you an answer. Let’s see what have we got next here? Are the custom dynamic ads created by Yelp? Great, great question. It’s a little bit of a together effort, but yes, we actually have a partner, Visual MAX, that helps us with those. But of course we want your branding and your message in there. So we’ll work together.
I’m seeing something about measurement around incrementality and I think the question is asking like how can Yelp measure incrementality of Yelp Audiences campaigns? And so we’re experimenting with incrementality methodology right now and we’re working on developing a lot of the tools. We really want to get this right, we want to make sure that we’re getting the incrementality measurement right for you because we know it’s so important. But I do want to just kind of bring us back to that better audience and remind us that whether it’s an incremental audience or not, because the same user could be on Facebook and on Yelp, but we know that when they’re on Yelp they have a need, they’re in market, they’ve got that money ready to spend on what you have to offer. And so we really focus on that conversion part of this better and unique audience.
Is the Yelp Audience a one time payment or do we have to renew? So this again kind of goes back to a little bit of what I was saying around. We’ll really work with you to create something unique. So based on the budget that we pick and your goals, we’ll come up with the right program link for you as well. I’ve seen it work in both ways where we do it as an always on campaign because you have consistent goals that you’re wanting to run and meet KPIs for regularly. So we’ll do some sort of monthly program that just keeps going. But I’ve also seen more event focused types of campaigns. I think open enrollment was a good example where there’s a very specific goal to a very specific time and we might do something shorter for something along those lines. Great questions everybody. Thank you for submitting them all. Let’s see what we have next.
Oh, I just read, let’s see what we have next. So we have, “do you have to have a website or can it just be details about my business to utilize this?” What a great question and I’m going to caveat this just a little bit because I don’t want to give the wrong answer, but as long as we have a place to drive them to, we should be able to build you a campaign. Now I’m going to like asterisk this because I want us to connect with our account teams, who are the specialists there. Off the top of my head, the best campaign examples that I have seen do drive back to an owned website. But I imagine that we probably have some pretty creative ideas around that. For example, the dynamic content ads going back, directing back to local Yelp listings. So definitely if that question was yours, please do book a time with us and I’m probably going to sit in on that meeting because I think that’s a great question and we want to get that one answered.
Okay, we have a couple of really great questions in here. [inaudible 00:32:16] I’m seeing a couple come up again around cost. Let me just maybe reiterate cost and how that works a little bit. So Yelp Audience is based on an ad budget that you’re going to work with your account team on and it’s really based around your goals. We want to know what you’re trying to accomplish so that we can work backwards and reverse engineer it in a sense to figure out what need to spend where and how long to get you the right price. And so just to kind of reiterate it again, we’ve seen campaigns that are a couple of thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, but it really just depends on what your goals are and you’re trying to accomplish. So if you book some time with us, we’ll be able to get you a much better answer than that crazy wide range that doesn’t help anybody. So please do book a time with us and we’ll get you a better answer on that.
Okay, any new questions in here? I think the rest were just based around some of the cost stuff. So I think that that answers most of the questions I’m seeing here. There were a couple maybe more specific questions that I saw. And so if I didn’t answer something that was more specifically about your business, please do know that if you submitted it without the anonymous button checked, we will get back to you and get that answered. But you’re more than welcome to book some time with us as well so that you can get that question quicker, more quickly answered.
And I’ll just throw these up here for you. Again, these are our resources again. So on the left, the campaign planner, you can download that one page campaign planner in the middle, go ahead and book some time with us, get all of those extra questions answered. Or if you’re ready to get started, we can do that by booking some time as well. And then our next webinar is coming up if you want to scan that QR code on the right. And I’ll leave this up just for a minute if anybody needs it. Otherwise, we will be sending the recording out to everyone with these resources. And I just want to say thank you for joining me again for your lunch. We’re very excited to have taken you through this and we look forward to seeing you for the next one.
