Agreed on Gil’s facebook suggestion. It is a lot lower, IMHO. Also.. internet users learn to ignore ads immediately, and very few actively click. The return on impressions is pretty bad.
I also have some thoughts about the worth of sponsorship, whether it obviously alters page views, and some ethical concerns in allowing businesses to highlight reviews. Most businesses have absolutely no idea how it works, and are simply scared *not* to participate. Stuff like this (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20081117/NEWS/811170304/1037/NEWS07) (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/yelp_sales_pitch/print.html) keeps popping up. Not that yelp *WILL* alter reviews, but that they mislead confused non tech biz owners into *thinking* they can….. or saying it outright.. is a problem.
I think the SEO stuff was bungled in that they didn’t use any formulaic approach to get organic searches, IE having the name of the reviews be words for indexing, etc. Now with the ad model falling apart, you have small challenges to work through… like the new search box in google, under “yelp”.. it will take away page views in the long run, albeit probably not a huge deal. But SEO is all that matters, and the ad models are falling apart. Google’s grab for page views is understandably greedy, especially in context of the doubeclick purchase. (https://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006157)
on top of that:
“According to a MediaWeek article on Nielsen’s report, advertisers in the financial services category spent 27% less on online display ads in the first half of 2008 as compared to the first half of 2007. This resulted in a 6% overall year-on-year decline in online display ad spending through the first two quarters of 2008.”
People know that CPM doesn’t work, but they desire something they are familiar with, and that can be quantified. What is odd is that there is desire to get ANY quantified number, whether it means anything valuable. Impressions are older than the internet right? It is simply something that was easier to understand than pay per click.
And the highly targeted audience idea is fine on facebook where you build and create ads based off of keywords, but yelps demographic of localized businesses is a bit skewed…. if I type in hotel, the range of types of hotels is massively hit and miss. When Gil says “market” he means city… right Gil? But how many styles and types of hotels are there? That’s a problem.
You see very little in the ROI. Page views do not equal sales, necessarily.
I have been on this site since June of 2006, and I am also a yelper constantly signed in. I have *never* clicked on any ads.
CPM, PPC… fancy graphs do not monetize a website because with no statistical return on revenue, people advert less.
And that is their ad model. I will find some more evidence of this ad model problem… just a sec