Thank you for this post. I also received a call from a VERY savvy Yelp rep. I was told that she doesn’t know how I’m eligible for $300 credit as they hardly ever issue credit for that amount, it’s usually less. Ha! I did sign up but I monitored the credit amount daily. As you get clicks on your ad, there’s a fee per click (I don’t remember the amt) when I noticed I was nearing almost $300 in charges, I cancelled everything I had signed up for that costs money i.e ads, license verified, call to action, etc. I ended up paying $125. By the way, the reason I cancelled was the amount of business generated did not come close to covering the cost of advertising with Yelp. Beware out there! There are many scammers!
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I was offered a $900 credit and it applied as soon as I signed up for the service as the rep walked me through it. However, when I checked in two days later to review the performance on my business site, what I noticed is that I was being charged 2/3 and the credit was being applied to 1/3 of the cost for each click. I knew then that I was going to immediately cancel since I was told that the credits would be applied to the initial exposure and traffic coming to the site. Then two days later something curious happened. One of the “clients” sent me a terse message indicating that she was Jennie P., not Jennie G! At that point it occurred to me that there is no way that Jennie P. would know about Jennie G. unless they worked together, since I would only respond to request by clicking on the response button. Also, that note came to me on the Jennie G message! I’m pretty certain that that unusually instantaneous spike in clicks on your business site comes from a department inside the company that is specifically set up to engineer artificial interest in your services. I also noticed that once I had canceled the service there were no more queries and none of the queries where I had provided and/or asked for more information responded back to me. I think it was all fake from the beginning! My recommendation: Do everything in writing and keep as much of a paper trail as you can. Speaking to them by phone does not provide the same evidence, just in case.
The only reason why I signed up for the second time is solely for the fact that the second time that representative told me that it he studied my account and he saw what went wrong last time and he will make sure that this time around it will be different, and the first $300 is on him. (which I later come to find out was a lie)
A few years ago a very well known Notary expert and trainer was singing the praises of Yelp. I did a little research and discovered Yelp wasn’t a good idea.
Sorry to hear that awful story. I get calls from Yelp all the time, but Ronnie at Notary Stars always tells us to never, ever advertise with them. They’re known for doing everything you described, and more. I’m glad you posted so all notaries can see this. Wish you luck with your business.
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Oh my, what a scummy company they are. How awful.
I paid for Yelp and it got me no extra work and they hide a lot of my reviews. I refuse to even use the yelp app for anything now.
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But your Yelp sales guy who scammed you out got his quarterly bonus.
ROI means Return On Investment, basically, how much money (clients) does your advertisement bring in.