What a certified Yelp partner is, and what it changes for your account.

Manage it yourself if your budget is small and you have time to watch it weekly. Below roughly a thousand dollars a month in ad spend, the one-time setup and optimization fee is hard to justify, the account will not qualify for the best partner incentives, and there is not enough click volume to tell what is working from what is noise. Above that, or if nobody on staff will open the dashboard, a certified partner adds credits, support, and tuning you cannot get on your own.

Most charge either a flat monthly fee or a percentage of ad spend, commonly 10 to 20 percent. We charge neither. There is a one-time setup and optimization fee, which is real money and the point at which most of the work happens, and after that we are paid by Yelp's rebate on managed spend. Some work sits outside that: review management, API and CRM connections, and creative production like graphics or video are quoted separately. Ask any agency whether they take the rebate as well as a management fee. Most partners do.

Yelp Ads do not require a contract, and on a self-serve account you can turn them on or off at any point in the month with a pro-rated bill.

Managed accounts work differently. We bill centrally, which is how the partner pricing and credits are applied in the first place, so we pay Yelp and you pay us. That means changes are not instant the way clicking a toggle is. It also means pausing mid-month, or mid-promotion, can cost you a promotional rate you were partway through earning. Tell us before you want something off and we will handle the timing.

Our management agreement runs on a three-month commitment.

Two ways. Centralized, which is the default, means we are billed by Yelp for the ad spend across every account we manage and you are billed by us. Decentralized means you pay Yelp directly and we manage the account without touching the money.

Centralized is how the partner program is designed to work. One invoice to one agency replaces a hundred separate accounts, and Yelp's sales and accounts receivable teams work with a single point of contact instead of managing each one individually. That efficiency is part of what the partner pricing and the client credits are paid for.

What it means in practice: your spend runs through us, changes go through us rather than through a toggle you click, and the account qualifies for pricing and promotions a self-serve advertiser cannot get.

We can manage a decentralized account in some circumstances, usually where a business has a billing structure that will not accommodate it. Ask. But a decentralized account sits outside the partner program's pricing, and the promotional rates, ad credits, and bundled offers that come with it are not available on spend we do not bill.

Not on the call itself. Yelp's sales team works to a quota and the offer will still be there tomorrow. Ask for the terms in writing, check the cancellation clause, and confirm the budget against what a lead in your category is worth. If you already work with a partner, the call routes to them instead.

No. Certification gives a partner an escalation path, not editorial control. A review comes down only if it breaks Yelp's content guidelines, and that call is Yelp's. Any agency promising review removal is either misreading the program or lying about it, and paying for ads does not change what the filter does either. What we can do is tell you whether a review is worth flagging and on what grounds, and how to respond in public so the next reader sees a business that handles problems well. Fifteen years of doing this is mostly knowing which fights are worth having.

You do, in every case. The Yelp account is yours, the ad spend is billed by Yelp to you directly, and the profile work stays in place. If we part ways we hand back access and the reporting history, and you keep running it or move it to someone else.