Case Study: Yelp

Yelp connects people to great local businesses through crowd-sourced reviews. Every month, Yelp sees over 73 million unique visitors from desktop, 69 million from mobile web, and has amassed over 23 million unique devices on the Yelp app.

Yelp helps businesses to engage with consumers at that critical moment when they’re deciding where to spend their money. Users have contributed approximately 108 million cumulative reviews of almost every type of local business, ranging from restaurants, boutiques and salons to dentists, mechanics and more. These reviews are written by people using Yelp to share their local business experiences, giving voice to consumers and bringing “word of mouth” online. The information these reviews provide is valuable for consumers and businesses alike.

Yelp revolves around three key groups: the contributors who write reviews, the consumers who read them, and the local businesses that they describe. Yelp communities have taken root in major cities across the world.

Yelp invests in user acquisition on both desktop and mobile, and with a high volume of users on both channels, it needed more transparency into its data. Yelp needed a way to tie together both acquisition channels, and connect the dots between desktop-to-mobile and mobile-to-desktop, allowing it to not only better understand the user base, but also provide even better user experiences.

Once Yelp integrated the adjust SDK into its app, the company set up a custom login event and a simulated install event which is triggered after the app is opened. Adjust offers a flexible event tracking system, where any in-app event can be tagged and tracked in real-time. Yelp ties together these custom events with custom event parameters within the SDK, which allows it to pass back even more granular information like a user’s custom hashed Yelp ID.

All of this information is passed back to Yelp’s own database using callbacks. Yelp receives this granular information instantly, along with any other data points it would like to receive on each and every event trigger. Yelp utilizes a redshift database to sync all of its callbacks. Here Yelp sees all its attribution data like device IDs, but also Yelp’s own custom IDs alongside important city data information. Yelp then queries its database and create its own custom reports using the data captured from both platforms.

By leveraging Adjust’s custom event generation tool and real-time callbacks, Yelp is connecting all of its app user data and desktop data together.

Linking desktop and mobile data has been a crucial missing piece of the puzzle, as Yelp can now see the full picture of the user journey. Tying both platforms together helps Yelp tell a more cohesive user story and has empowered it with the tools needed to make more informed marketing decisions.