Amir V.

I am a small business owner in Fremont, California. I have been advertising on Yelp for the past 5-6 years. Recently, I noticed that my business performance is way down compared to last year and after doing some research, I realized that I am not getting same number of customers from Yelp compared to last year. I started to do some digging and found out that even after I increased my budget from $4,000 to $5,000 per month, I am getting even less customers from Yelp than last month. I did some more research and found out that Yelp has increased the cost of "pay-per-click" over 50%. We as advertisers do not choose the cost per click, Yelp does (unlike google and other platforms) and the way they do it by making advertisers to believe there is an automatic auction and other factors that can change the cost per click, misleading verbiage. Basically, what Yelp does is to calculate the cost per click based on my monthly budget divided by the number of clicks. Another words, if they underperform or cut their cost down on advertising to generate more revenue, I pay a higher price for Yelp. Or if there is a slow month, Yelp does not care, they get paid no matter what. To give you an idea, if there are 100,000 clicks per month in one region generated by Yelp and total budget for that region is $400,000, the cost per click would be $4, but if next month there are 50,000 clicks for the same region, then the cost per click goes up to $8 for Yelp to make the same revenue of $400,000.
I called Yelp and talked to two different people and they had no answer and even they agreed with me, there was nothing they could do about it nor gave me a number for their superior. I have spoken to many other Yelp advertisers and they all feel they are getting cheated out of their money. My $5,000 budget is exactly how much Yelp charges my card, $5,000, not a penny less or more. What Yelp is doing is exactly like if I charge my customers 50% more simply because I had a slow month!
I have spent over $250,000 on Yelp over the past few years and I think I have been overcharged over $100,000.
I advertised on Google in the past, the difference is that I get to pick the cost per click for keywords and my budget was $4,000 per month, at the end of the month it was never $4,000 but close to it ($3,500 to $3,900), simply number of clicks multiplied by cost that I picked.
Look into your account and you will see, and if you can find a way to do something about it, please don't hesitate to share