Any time a new social media network or major website unleashes new marketing tools or potential, the collective glee of brands can almost be heard around the world. While PPC advertising has been around for ages, newer additions by select brands – such as Indeed and Yelp – are providing brands with new opportunities to target specific communities and audiences.

Yelp Ads itself isn’t anything new, but a variety of new features that have been added do in fact give it an inherent upgrade. This will undoubtedly help supercharge many brand efforts – especially as it relates to PPC marketing.

So with no further ado, let’s look at the changes to Yelp Ads and what new features are available.

Profiles and Ads Have Been Integrated

Any brand on Yelp can claim its “Yelp for Business” page, which is quite similar to GMB pages that brands can control via search. Previously, these pages were effectively disconnected from Yelp Ads, meaning that analytics and data gathered by one was stored separately from the other.

Nevertheless, recent changes have now combined both organic and paid metrics into one tool. This ultimately makes it far easier to track trends, changes and ad performance while being abreast of how many others are seeing your brand organically.

By pinging servers with both sets of information in one place, Yelp business owners can more easily access all data from one central utility.

New Yelp Ads Features

In addition to merging Yelp for Business and Yelp Ads into one control panel, a number of new features for Yelp Ads have also been unveiled.

Perhaps the most valuable addition is the ad goals option: with this, you can specify what you want to achieve via your ads. Do you want more phone calls, in-person visits, clicks or messages? All you need do is specify your goals and provide a budget.

Yelp Ads also now features keyword management tools. Not only can you utilize positive keywords, but negative keywords as well. This makes it possible to target audiences regardless of sentiment or experience. It also minimizes budget waste when used properly.

You’ll now also be able to see how big your potential audience is with the selections you’ve made. Many social media networks and search engines have this critical feature; now Yelp does, too!

Soon to Be Yelp Ads Features

In conjunction with these hot new features, what else does Yelp have planned for its PPC ad arsenal?

Perhaps the most exciting possibility is the impression heat map: by seeing who’s pinging servers (and from where) and seeing your ads your ads in the process, you’ll be able to more effectively target – and verify – that your ads are reaching the right geographic audiences.

Another feature touted by Yelp is the upcoming lead summary/visualization feature. This will let Yelp users determine how their campaigns are actually producing leads (and in what form). Designed to more effectively highlight how your campaigns are performing via clicks, calls and other lead-based actions, this will undoubtedly be very useful for brands when it is rolled out.

While these updates may seem relatively minor, they will provide unprecedented versatility to Yelp PPC campaigns. As unorthodox platforms such as Yelp continue to embrace PPC, marketing itself is becoming more feature-rich and customized based on each brand’s exact needs.