OREANDA-NEWS.  Yelp Inc. (NYSE: YELP), the company that connects consumers with great local businesses, today announced it has acquired Turnstyle Analytics Inc., a Wi-Fi marketing company that is pioneering the way local businesses use free Wi-Fi to connect with their customers. The addition of Turnstyle strengthens Yelp’s position as a leading customer acquisition platform for local businesses, expanding its offering to include simple, effective tools for customer retention and loyalty.

Based in Toronto, Canada, Turnstyle was founded in 2012 as a location-based marketing and analytics platform that provides Wi-Fi as a digital marketing tool to retain and reward customers. The service currently supports nearly 3,500 business locations worldwide. As part of Yelp, Turnstyle’s service offers businesses tools to harness their guest Wi-Fi as an easy way to keep in touch with customers who visit their locations in order to drive repeat visits and in-store sales.

Turnstyle’s core technology allows consumers to tap into free guest Wi-Fi while helping businesses re-engage those customers in the future via email. Businesses can build highly targeted customer contact lists and access powerful analytics that provide insight into visit frequency and duration. Combining this offline data with Yelp’s extensive online and mobile search data will deliver a comprehensive intent-based marketing resource to local businesses.

“We’re excited to expand our product offering for local businesses through this acquisition. Turnstyle helps connect businesses to consumers through free public Wi-Fi, and is an effective retention and loyalty program that helps businesses be more successful,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp co-founder and chief executive officer.

"Since our founding, Turnstyle has focused on building the best Wi-Fi marketing service to help businesses," said Devon Wright, Turnstyle’s co-founder and chief executive officer. "This is an exciting opportunity to expand and leverage Yelp’s resources and capabilities; together we’ll be able to help even more local businesses improve their customer retention, driving more repeat business.”

Acquisition Details

Under the terms of the purchase agreement, Yelp acquired all of Turnstyle’s outstanding capital stock for approximately $20 million, paid in cash.

About Yelp

Yelp Inc. connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp has taken root in major metros in more than 30 countries. Approximately 24 million unique devices1 accessed Yelp via the Yelp app, approximately 73 million unique visitors visited Yelp via desktop computer2 and approximately 65 million unique visitors visited Yelp via mobile website3 on a monthly average basis during the fourth quarter of 2016. By the end of the same quarter, Yelpers had written approximately 121 million rich, local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists.

1 Calculated as the number of unique devices accessing the app on a monthly average basis over a given three-month period, according to internal Yelp logs.

2 Calculated as the number of “users,” as measured by Google Analytics, accessing Yelp via desktop computer on a monthly average basis over a given three-month period.

3 Calculated as the number of “users,” as measured by Google Analytics, accessing Yelp via the mobile website on a monthly average basis over a given three-month period.