My name's Jeff Morgan. I'm the son of a son of a plumber. I've had my own plumbing company for 18 years. Four years ago, our business consisted of word-of-mouth advertising. There was eight to 10 people. Today we've doubled that and plan on doubling it again in the next four years and maybe less.
We stumbled upon Yelp three years ago. We already knew Yelp was working because we had reviews on Yelp. We didn’t even know what it was at the time. So when we talked to our account manager, who called us and informed us of these reviews, it was a very short amount of time before we decided to jump in, and it was scary at first. It was cutting-edge technology. It was nowhere where we’d ever spent any advertising dollars before, so it was new and it’s always scary for an old guy.
I will tell you, as a business owner, I like Yelp best because right off the bat, we were informed that we could only pay them the amount that they had for traffic. There’s only 200 people a month looking at their website for a plumbing company. They’re only going to be able to charge us X amount of months for advertising, otherwise, we’re just giving them money for nothing. As Yelp has expanded and more people are on Yelp, then our advertising dollars can go up. That made a big difference to us. That made us trust Yelp right away.
Every month, I’ve really dug in to see where each and every dollar came from. It’s about a 10-to-one return. It’s been very consistent, and that’s the beautiful thing about today, is that you get this instant feedback. I’m not sitting there hoping that my Yellow Pages had worked this year. I know my ROI is going to be there month after month. It’s easy.
