In today’s digital world, consumers are becoming more connected and tech-savvy than ever before. If you are a marketer, this means being where your consumers are is a necessity. You need to meet their increasingly high expectations and personalize your advertising to gain their attention more effectively.

To drive conversions and gain loyal customers, your local business needs to integrate an omnichannel marketing strategy and take advantage of all the digital platforms that are currently available online. In other words, not relying only on widely-used media channels Facebook and Google to run your multi-platform advertising campaigns.

Granted, Facebook and Google are vital to your overall digital marketing strategies. There is no doubt that both platforms are essential for reaching your online audience. Statista reports that Google accounts for 90.46% of all search engine markets worldwide while Facebook currently has 2.5 billion active users.

Of course, we are not suggesting that you ignore these platforms, but rather that you consider all the platforms or apps available online and then decide which strategy fits your marketing objectives best.

With that in mind, let’s take a deeper look at other digital channels available online – particularly Yelp and Microsoft Ads, and how they can help your marketing campaigns reach a wider audience network. 

What are Yelp Audiences?

Launched in July 2021, Yelp Audiences was introduced as a platform to help advertisers connect with consumers across the web based on Yelp search activity. Yelp Audiences offers an opportunity for location-based, direct-to-consumer, and online advertisers to reach Yelp’s high-intent audience during all stages of the buying cycle.

The launch of Yelp Audiences began when KitchenAid, a culinary appliances company, worked with Yelp in May 2021 to deliver off-platform ads that encourage consumers to eat at women-owned restaurants in their local markets as a part of their ‘A Woman’s Place’ campaign.

With Yelp Audiences, digital marketers can reach consumers on the Yelp platform based on behaviors and purchasing intent displayed on Yelp, with audience segmentation based on aspects such as search terms, category interest, and leads.

Here’s a quick look at how can digital advertisers can use Yelp Audience platform to reach Yelp users off the platform:

• Behavior-based targeting: Yelp has partnered with demand-side platforms (DSPs) to deliver ads to its users on third-party sites, apps, and video streaming services (through CTV). The targeting based on Yelp users’ activity includes search, delivery and takeout actions, search filters, and category interests.

• Measuring performance: Ads on Yelp Audiences are displayed in a way digital advertisers and clients can receive regular updates on advertising metrics, with reports and insights that offer a summary of a marketing campaign’s overall performance.

• Yelp Audiences vs. Yelp Audience Network: Yelp has a similar platform, Yelp Audience Network, which enables advertisers to run ads on third-party sites. Its key difference with Yelp Audiences is that clicking on ads shown on the Yelp Audience Network takes users to the advertiser’s Yelp business page.

"For years, advertisers have wanted to make more meaningful connections with consumers and Yelp's unmatched data allows us to support that," Yelp’s senior vice president, Tom Foran, told Business Wire.

With Yelp Audiences, ads don’t have to lead consumers back to Yelp’s platform, making it more useful for digital marketers in more verticals. 

What are the Benefits of the Yelp Audiences Platform?

With key features on how digital advertisers can utilize Yelp Audiences to reach users off of the platform in mind, let’s dive in and look at how you could leverage the platform to support your business even further: 

Reach Local Businesses and Communities

Considered the #1 online review site, Yelp currently has 178 million unique monthly visitors with over 29 million local businesses listed. With its distance targeting feature, Yelp advertisers can show ads relative to their businesses in a location-based format. For industries in the home service professionals, doctors, and dentists’ offices, Yelp could prove to have a very successful ROI. 

Find Yelp Audiences with Purchase Intent

Yelp users engage in high-intent searches to find local businesses near them. This is unlike Google, where users are online to conduct general research. According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers purchase after visiting Yelp’s platform. 79% of those consumers purchase within a week. 

Target More Narrow Yelp Audiences

Half of Yelp users are reported to have income greater than $100,000 per year, with over 80% of them having a college background. There are thousands of business page categories available on Yelp.com, and the shopping category makes up 21% of the total.

To put it simply, the majority of Yelp users are 35 years old and over, have money, and have a purchase intent, which makes them ideal candidates for any Yelp advertiser! 

How do I Create a Yelp Campaign?

If you’ve set up ads on other platforms such as Google Ads before, this process on how to set up and create a campaign on Yelp is very similar. Here’s the basic step-by-step process on how to go about it, according to ​​Yelp’s Getting Started guide: 

1. Outline a goal for your campaign: The first step is to select a goal for your Yelp campaign. There are several goal types businesses can choose to optimize for, namely website visitors, phone calls, and messages.

2. Select an ad photo: You can either let Yelp test various ad photos and use the one that gets the most clicks or you can select your own ad photo. 

3. Write your ad copy: Yelp recommends writing an ad copy that pinpoints what is unique or special about your brand to ensure you’re attracting relevant customers, and give potential consumers that extra push to click on your ad. 

4. Choose your keyword searches: By default, Yelp will display this section is automatically populated with pre-set keywords that are pulled from your business listing – you can choose which words to keep or remove based on what makes the most sense for your business. 

5. Select your target location: Yelp ad campaigns work based on location-based targeting, so you can decide how far or close to your location you want ads to be displayed. For example, you can geo-target your ad to be displayed a specified number of miles away from your business location, allowing you to better target your audience. 

6. Set the daily budget: In this section, Yelp will display an estimated CPC and the number of clicks you’ll get each day to help decide the daily budget. The platform will also automatically recommend a set budget based on the typical ad spend for businesses in your industry.  

Benefits of Microsoft Ads

In addition to using Yelp Audiences, there are three reasons why running ads with Microsoft could also be beneficial for business owners. These include: 

Reaching a Wider Audience Network

When you advertise with Microsoft, your ads will appear on the search results page of Bing, AOL, Yahoo-owned sites, and Microsoft’s syndicated network partner sites like Amazon, Wall Street Journal, CBS Interactive, and more.

If your customer base is older and less tech-savvy, Microsoft’s network of advertising platforms could prove to be a better alternative to Google and social media platforms like Facebook. 

Lower cost-per-click (CPC)

When compared with advertising costs on Google, Microsoft is much cheaper with a 29% lower cost per sale! Microsoft automatically sets your bid in real-time to get as many clicks as possible within your set budget. Below is the A/B test result done by Spinutech on Google ads vs. Bing ads.

Reaching More Affluent Audiences

Nearly 71% of the Microsoft Search Network’s audiences are 35 and older. Furthermore, 54% of those audiences are reported to have an income of $75,000 and higher. These audience groups tend to spend more money online than their Google counterparts. 

Run Microsoft and Yelp Ads with Adriel

Yes, you can manage your Microsoft and Yelp ads with Adriel. Adriel is a one-stop platform for both large and small businesses to manage or optimize all their online advertising channels, centralized data, and metrics.

With our constant efforts to integrate new platforms and improve user experience, we hope that digital marketers around the world will keep leveraging our revolutionary technology to reach their true advertising potential.

Start managing your ads with Adriel.