Yelp Ads management for local service companies.

The first thing to fix on Yelp is the unit. The platform reports a “contact”, and a contact is not a job. A contact can be someone opening your profile; a Local Services Ads lead is a phone ringing. Put the two costs side by side in a report and Yelp looks several times better than a channel that may in fact be cheaper per booked job. The only figure that compares across channels is cost per completed job.

So the review starts one step past the click: what share of contacts are real prospects for the work you want, what happens to them after the message arrives, and what a booked job from Yelp actually costs once you count it that way. In a thin-margin trade that gap matters more than the bid — with roughly $51 of margin to spend on acquiring a cleaning customer, a channel that looks cheap per contact can still be losing money per job.

What we change is narrower than most Yelp advice suggests. The profile has to carry proof a stranger can check — photographs of real jobs, the categories you actually want work in, a response time you can hold on a busy week. The category and budget settings have to stop paying for the work you do not want. Then the channel is reviewed weekly against the rest of the mix on one unit. Yelp earns its place in some markets and loses it in others, and the only way to know which one you are in is to count booked jobs rather than contacts.