Yelp

I'm sure I've talked before about how annoying Yelp can be if you ever add your own "free" page.  Yes, the page is free, but their incessant bugging makes you wonder if it's worth it.

I almost forgot about this from the other day, but I got an email today that reminded me... it started off, "In September, you had 8 views to your Yelp Business Page."  Who-hoo, a whopping 8 views.

Let's backtrack a moment.  I got a call the other day from a nice lady at Yelp, and I suppose they choose their employees based on how pushy they are, because you can never get them off the phone, and no matter WHAT you say, they tell you how much you NEED their business.

They're always telling me, oh I had so many clicks.  So, the lady the other day told me that my business page was really busy!  Lots of activity!  She wanted me to log onto my business page (surprise surprise, I didn't want to), and I told her, please just give me a number.  You're gonna love this.  I had 98 views on my business page in the last 12 months.  Let me repeat that.  I had 98 views in the last 12 months.

Let's compare to the website, shall we? 

I realize that pic is showing up way way huge and may look kinda funky, but I want you to be able to see / read the important parts.  Note, on the top right, it shows that these are the statistics for the "nwichins" site, for the "last 28 days."  Let me repeat.  Last 28 days.

Notice, in the last 28 days, there have been 2,272 visitors.  Let's say that was an awesome month, to give Yelp some leeway, and say that in a month, there were only 2,000 visitors.  That still means, in a year, that's 24,000 visitors (I don't have the premium version of Clicky / statistics, so I'm limited to what I can view), and that would likely be on the low end.  Now, come again, Yelp, with that whopping 98 visitors to the page in the last year?

Every time they call, they want me to upgrade my profile.  Oh it's ONLY $300 a month.  This time they called, it was ONLY $3/day.  Well, that's still ~ $100/month, and that's $100/month too much for me.  I do my best to wait for there to be a "sale" to renew my website, but even without the sale price, I looked at my billing, and I have paid between $200-400 for two years of my website, since I have had it. Even at $400 for two years, that's $16.67/month, or around 50 cents per day.  And again, it gets ~2,000+ visitors per month.  But totally, I'm going to pay Yelp exponentially more, when they haven't showed me that they're worth it.

Honestly, if I wanted to dump another $100/month into advertising, I'd probably do it on facebook.  Where everyone is.  I actually like yelp as far as finding a restaurant and that sort of thing... but for this... no.