New Yelp Feature Takes Consumers from Browsing to Buying

Consumers come to Yelp ready to make a spending decision and they rely on Yelp's wealth of valuable content to find a local business to fit their needs. Today we’re introducing a new feature for business owners, designed to further close the loop between discovering a business on Yelp and making a purchase at that business. Yelp’s new Call to Action feature allows business owners to promote a desired transaction of their choosing directly on their Yelp business listing.

According to a recent BCG study, advertisers on Yelp report seeing an average of $23,000 in annual revenue from the site. Yelp’s Call to Action feature, available now to Yelp advertisers, is designed to increase the revenue potential Yelp provides to business owners, with the ability to promote a specific action they’d like consumers to take. The Call to Action feature will take consumers seamlessly from a business’ Yelp listing to the the business’ own website to complete the transaction — be it scheduling an appointment, printing a coupon, buying tickets to see ‘N Sync (still holding out hope for a reunion tour!), or any other action a business wants to promote.

Ticketmaster, the global leader in event ticketing and one of the world's top five e-Commerce businesses, was one of the first companies to launch with Yelp’s Call to Action pilot program. By implementing the feature on Yelp listings for over 2,000 of its live entertainment venues across the US and Canada, consumers are taken from a venue’s listing directly to the Ticketmaster site where they can buy tickets to upcoming events. As Ticketmaster’s President of North America, Jared Smith, puts it, “Yelp is a great platform that many of our clients use to help their fans discover and gather information about live events. We're excited to have developed a strategic partnership with Yelp to help our clients capture this demand and make the event discovery and ticket buying process easier for Yelp’s 102 million monthly unique visitors*.” 

The Call to Action feature will work on both desktop and mobile, reaching Yelp users through all avenues, including the approximately 10 million monthly unique mobile devices using the app. Business owners who are interested in enabling the Call to Action feature on their business listing or advertising with Yelp can go to: www.yelp.com/advertise.

*Monthly average for Q1 2013, according to Google Analytics