Yelp has announced the rollout of a series of new features aimed at helping local businesses reach broader audiences beyond their immediate localities. The introduction of custom location targeting, budget recommendations and several other features means local proprietors will no longer be limited to marketing their products and services to customers around their physical location only.
The announcement came this month, when Yelp unveiled its new machine learning-generated budget recommendations system and a long-awaited customer location targeting feature, among several new additions to its platform.
Custom Location Targeting (CLT)
For the first time, businesses advertising on Yelp will now have the opportunity to select the specific geographic location where their ads will appear. Prior to now, it was only possible for advertisers to run campaigns in the immediate vicinity around the physical location of their businesses.
Yelp developed and introduced a new feature in response to growing demand among business owners working from home and those providing remote services outside their physical confines.
“This feature addresses that need and, especially as we’ve seen a rise in virtual service offerings, also enables business owners to reach a wider audience beyond their physical location,” read the statement from Yelp.
This long-awaited new service has already been rolled out for all new self-service advertisers, with Yelp confirming that all of its users will be able to access the feature within the next few weeks.
New Budget Recommendations
Yelp also outlined an overhaul of the platform’s budget editing features, introducing new machine learning-generated budget recommendations for advertisers. According to Yelp, the new budget editor will help advertisers make more informed decisions with intelligent budget recommendations.
The system has been designed to strategically analyse campaign performance and audience data in general, which is then considered against the profile of the business to generate recommendations for more efficient budgeting.
“Business owners use Yelp to reach high intent consumers and these new features will make those connections even more effective. The past year has been incredibly challenging for business owners across all industries and we know that the decision to spend money on advertising can be hard, which is why we are constantly working to improve our product to ensure our customers get the highest return for their spend,” Yelp commented.
Further Features and Refinements
The press release published by Yelp also outlined several further features and refinements to its existing system, including an improved tutorial for new businesses looking to set up Yelp profiles and a fully overhauled Yelp for Business mobile app dashboard, porting further features from the desktop interface over to mobile.
Yelp also indicated that further refinements and new features would be outlined and introduced in the near future, developed on the basis of customer feedback and direct requests from local businesses.
“Even as we roll out these updates, we’re already working on the next iterations and will continue to listen to business owner feedback to inform how we can best improve Yelp for Business to help them succeed,” read the statement from Yelp.
“We know a one-size fits all approach doesn’t work for local businesses — what works for restaurants might not work for home services, and vice versa — which is why we’re continuing to personalise and build new features in our Self-serve channel to give business owners more control and transparency, all while allowing them to harness the power of the Yelp platform.”