Yelp drives discovery of new services using personalized in-product marketing
With Kevel, Yelp automated and added new targeting features to their in-product marketing system
What Yelp Wanted
Yelp’s site and app connects people with great local businesses. With unmatched business information, including over 224 million reviews, Yelp provides a one-stop platform for consumers to discover local businesses.
In order to promote new features and services to their users, Yelp had a homegrown solution for in-product marketing, but sought an even more robust platform to unlock greater potential.
To accomplish this — and to do it quickly — Yelp turned to Kevel’s APIs to build a platform for managing their in-product marketing. Within weeks they launched their first unit — a banner at the top of their site and app that employed custom targeting to promote Yelp services.
Not only did better targeting increase user engagement rates, but the set-up meant manual engineering work was no longer needed to make changes, saving time for engineers to focus on other priorities.
Yelp’s in-product marketing seamlessly blends into the user experience
With Kevel, Yelp can easily surface the right message to the right user at the right time. In this example, Yelp is highlighting (during prime moving season) how users can search for movers with Yelp.
The native CTA element fits nicely into the in-app experience and directs users to a local search showing nearby moving companies.
"We view Kevel as a smart CMS. They allow us to easily add logic to decide what content gets shown to whom, without having to make changes to the look and feel of our site or app."
– David Wang, Tech Lead
Yelp personalizes promotions within its business portal too
During the height of COVID-19, Yelp leveraged Kevel to quickly deploy prompts to encourage business owners to update their information, so that users had the most up-to date business details in a time of uncertainty.
"Our marketing team is a fan of Kevel because they no longer need to ask Engineering to make changes, which means updates now happen in minutes, not days or weeks."
– Nolan Chao, Lead Product Manager, Growth
Server-side integration ensures fast response times and good user experiences
User experience is pivotal to Yelp, so it was important that these call-to-actions load quickly and be aligned with their brand. Fortunately, the integration with Kevel is server-side and doesn’t use tags, giving them full control over how the promotions are displayed.
This meant that Yelp could switch to Kevel on the back end without making any changes to the look of their platform.
Yelp’s marketing team can makes updates without needing developer resources
With Kevel’s UI and Management APIs, Yelp teams can easily set up, manage, and report on their promotions without using engineering resources to make changes. Previously, these updates could take weeks to implement (depending on release cycles) but Kevel’s platform allows them to now be updated within minutes.
Keyword and intent targeting improved engagement rates
While their original in-house solution had some targeting capabilities, Yelp can now more quickly add additional targeting logic to customize the content each user sees.
Better targeting means more relevant call-to-actions, which increases the effectiveness and click-through rates of in-product marketing.
"The initial use case took us only a few weeks to launch, and we’ve since expanded on Kevel by adding additional use cases and features."
– David Wang, Tech Lead