Eyal Grundstein on Personalizing Growth: From Yelp Segments to Meta’s Millions

Eyal Grundstein doesn’t talk about growth marketing in abstractions. Instead, he talks about it in lived battles, from mobile gaming’s early days to the scaled complexity of Meta’s ad business. Over 15 years, he’s seen the field shift from “the wild west into the data-driven discipline that it is,” carrying one insight through every role: personalization wins. Whether helping Yelp tailor onboarding for frantic homeowners or guiding Meta’s team to design vertical-specific programs for millions of advertisers, Grundstein has built a career proving that personally relevant advertising drives growth.

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The Growth Hurdle

At Yelp, where Grundstein led consumer marketing, he confronted a classic challenge: one product, many use cases. “Yelp... is one app that serves completely different needs,” he explains. “Someone might be looking for the best pizza parlor... someone else needs a good yoga studio, and then you have a homeowner with a leaky roof... These aren’t just different searches… these are different people with different mindsets and different intent.”

Generic marketing was leaving growth on the table. Grundstein’s mandate was to scale paid performance marketing by personalizing Yelp’s funnel, delivering the right message and experience to the right user.

His team tested segment-specific ads and onboarding flows. “Instead of showing the same generic ad and funneling all the users to the same onboarding flow, what if we kind of segmented our approach and had a more personalized experience?” he recalls. One test: an ad for emergency home repairs that led users into a home service–focused welcome screen, rather than the generic app flow.

Cracking the Code

“The results were really eye-opening,” he says. Tailored ads and experiences boosted engagement, retention, and long-term value. The win cemented his belief that full-funnel personalization, from the first ad to the in-app experience, could be a growth engine.

Grundstein carried that philosophy to Meta, where he applied it at a massive scale. As Head of Growth Marketing for small and medium business advertiser’s growth and performance, he helped “hundreds of millions of businesses and millions of… paying advertisers” by segmenting strategies by industry. “We actually took that approach of personalization one level deeper at Meta as well,” he explains, describing vertical-specific programs for e-commerce, services, retail, and more.

Grundstein emphasizes that even small teams can start personalizing by focusing on high-potential segments. “I would try to really have [smaller teams] focus on one or two high potential use cases to prove out the model,” he advises. Simple tweaks, like customizing creative and onboarding for different segments, can deliver results. The key is treating personalization as “a prioritization exercise,” tackling segments one by one in order of impact.

Proof in the Numbers

At Yelp, personalized campaigns lifted engagement and revenue. At Meta, the same approach helped millions of businesses succeed, proving personalization is “a key lever” for growth. Tools, Grundstein cautions, are secondary. “To some degree, you have to be tool agnostic and tactic-focused right now,” he says, noting how AI tools change monthly. The strategy comes first; tools should follow.

Still, AI can accelerate personalization by lowering creative costs and surfacing insights. Grundstein sees promise in using generative AI to spin up ad variations and test quickly. The key is agility: “Think of what tactics you want to explore and which tools you can use right now, but not tie yourself down to a particular tool for the longer term.”

Eyal Grundstein’s career shows that growth marketing is about understanding people, intent, and connection. Personalization isn’t a luxury for big-budget teams; it’s a discipline any marketer can adopt.

If you’re looking for more conversations like this, check out the Just One Thing podcast from Bidease. To keep up with Eyal’s thinking on growth and personalization, connect with him on LinkedIn or his personal website eyal.it.