Yelp Doesn't Just Drive Customers Into Local Businesses, It's Also Getting Them To Buy

Yelp is indispensable to local searchers, especially those inclined to make a purchase. Ninety-three percent of U.S. Yelp users in a recent Nielsen study said they at least occasionally make a purchase from a local business after using Yelp. On mobile, Yelp's local services are even more relevant, making the company a bellwether for the huge opportunity in local-mobile marketing.

Yelp's mobile user base climbed to 10.4 million in June 2013. Yelp is now in fierce competition with Google's local services, and also going head-to-head with FourSquare, which is building an ad platform of its own. Yelp is also often mentioned in connection with social-local-mobile strategies, sometimes known as SoLoMo.

At BI Intelligence, Business Insider's paid subscription service, we recently analyzed over 20 datasets culled from a variety of sources to probe the viability of mobile and social media as local commerce and retail-drivers. We published our insights in two recent reports, "A Guide to Local-Mobile Marketing: The Best Strategies And Tactics For Leveraging Local Data," and "How Location-Based Data Is Transforming The Entire Mobile Industry."

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Local-mobile strategies are certainly working for Yelp, and the businesses that advertise on Yelp's app and mobile site. Local advertisements on mobile devices constituted 40% of Yelp's overall local ad inventory in the last quarter for which data's available. That's up from 25% just two quarters ago.

Here's a look at growth in Yelp's local advertising share, charted against the growth in revenue from local advertising.

Yelp's mobile app users are engaged through local discovery and the ability to make on-the-go reservations and appointments. Some might even write reviews on their handheld devices. Yelp can harvest all that relevant user information while also pinpointing a user's whereabouts.

As is the case with Google, the influx of mobile app users - and the increase in local ad inventory on mobile - have inflated Yelp's overall local ad revenue.

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