Survey Results Show Yelp To Be The Highest Quality Local Review Site

The results of a new Nielsen survey show that Yelp is the most frequently used, most trusted and highest quality local reviews site.  The other competitors included in the survey were Angie’s List, Citysearch, OpenTable, TripAdvisor, YP and Zagat.

Yelp commissioned the survey using a sample of just over 1,000 U.S. users of review sites.  Although the survey included 22 questions, only a few of the results were released.  The sample was weighted for age and gender so that it was representative of Nielsen’s NetView audience profile data on user review site visitors.

The survey found that 78 percent of consumers use review sites to find local businesses and to help make decisions about purchases.  The data that was released then compares how Yelp ranks against others in the criteria, “most influential”, “most trustworthy” and “best quality reviews”.  Yelp came out on top in each of these categories.

However, once Yelp released these results, the reaction included a great deal of skepticism throughout the industry, with some experts questioning the validity of the survey.  For example, why weren’t Google and Facebook included?  When asked about this, Yelp responded by stating that, “Our findings specifically around review sites came after we included Google and Facebook in a question on what sites people use to find local businesses, but those sites aren’t solely focused on local business discovery.  We dug deeper into those sites that are.”

Some feel that although it can be argued that it was reasonable for Yelp to exclude Google and Facebook because they offer broader use cases than simply “local business discovery”, it is possible that Yelp found this loophole because those sites greatly exceeded Yelp as a source for local business information.

Another potentially questionable aspect of the survey is that among the 1,000 respondents, there were 668 Yelp users.  Yelp responded to this concern by stating that, “For this survey, we asked for 1000+ users of review sites but didn’t care which ones they used.  They later self-identified that they had or do use Yelp, merely showing our dominance in the market.  It wouldn’t make sense to exclude Yelp users from the survey.”

Some of the specifics found in the survey results include:

• Users chose Yelp 4.5 times more often than Angie’s List and almost 3 times more often than TripAdvisor as being the most influential review site when making final purchase decisions

• Users chose Yelp almost 3 times more often than Angie’s List and almost 1.5 times more often than TripAdvisor when ranking sites with the most trustworthy reviews

• Users chose Yelp 2.5 times more often than Angie’s List when choosing which sites have the best quality reviews

The survey results also indicate that when users are searching specifically for restaurants, Yelp is named as the most frequently used review site, cited by consumers nearly 3 times as often as Open Table and almost 4 times as often as Zagat.