Now Google Offers is doing what the company does best—aggregate stuff from multiple sites. The search giant is partnering with 14 smaller deal sites, including Dealfind and Gilt City, so you can get your deals in one place.Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Oct. 27 moved to expand its Google Offers purview to include more than restaurants, museum and massages, adding offers for outdoor sports, classes and luxury goods from new daily deals providers.
To do this, Google partnered with 14 deal providers. Deals from these players will appear alongside Google's own Offers, and when users click on them, they stay within the Offers framework instead of being whisked away to the deal sites. Google's newish deal aggregator property, The DealmapGoogle said it will gradually introduce deals from its partners in the coming months.
Google is also offering existing Offers users a new personalization quiz that lets users tip Offers off to what categories and preferences they like. Offers launched in Portland, Ore., last April, offering people in that city local discount deals of 50 percent or more to restaurants, bars and other stores. That requires more selective, targeted offers, the problem Google's personalization quiz is trying to solve.
On Thursday, Google transformed its Google Offers daily-deals site into an umbrella offering of sorts, partnering with 14 separate deals providers.
With the new relationship, Google Offers will send a daily emailed Offer, combining the offers from the other partners inside of it. Partners include Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, Juice in the City, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, Plum District, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR and zozi, Google said. Google executives said that the new Offers were designed to help users find an expanded range of daily deals in one place. Google said that DealMap, a service that Google acquired in August, had helped bring the expanded Offers together.
"We're making improvements to Google Offers that help address this challenge," Nitin Mangtani, a group product manager for Google Offers, wrote in a blog post. It's unclear what the smaller deals providers will get out of the expanded relationship with Google. To help consumers parse the different deals, Google said it will also post a "personalization quiz" helping Google identify which deals it should be sending to the consumer, as well as where the deals should be located.
On Thursday, Google transformed its Google Offers daily-deals site into an umbrella offering of sorts, partnering with 14 separate deals providers.
With the new relationship, Google Offers will send a daily emailed Offer, combining the offers from the other partners inside of it. Google executives said that the new Offers were designed to help users find an expanded range of daily deals in one place. Google said that DealMap, a service that Google acquired in August, had helped bring the expanded Offers together.
"We're making improvements to Google Offers that help address this challenge," Nitin Mangtani, a group product manager for Google Offers, wrote in a blog post. It's unclear what the smaller deals providers will get out of the expanded relationship with Google. To help consumers parse the different deals, Google said it will also post a "personalization quiz" helping Google identify which deals it should be sending to the consumer, as well as where the deals should be located.
The largest Internet search company said its Google Offers business will distribute daily deals from at least 15 other daily deal sites, including Gilt City, kgbdeals, TIPPR, Plum District and Juice in the City.
Google Offers subscribers in the San Francisco Bay Area will get the new deals first, but the company plans to roll out the bigger inventory of deals to new cities in coming months. Google tried to buy Groupon, the largest daily deal site, for about $6 billion in 2010, but was rebuffed. Google will continue sourcing its own daily deals, but the changes announced on Thursday mean Google can offer a lot more deals without expanding its sales force a lot. Google generated less than 1 percent of Groupon's gross billings in September, Sinsky noted.
Google Offers will now start aggregating deals from these partners: Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, JuiceInTheCity, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, PlumDistrict, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR and zozi. These deals will run alongside Google’s existing offers, which its sales staff will continue to source directly. The expanded selection of deals will first appear in San Francisco before expanding to Google Offers’ other markets.
Google Offers is not just trying to aggregate deals, something Bing Deals, Yipit and plenty of others already do. Users can pay for any deal right through Google Offers. Google will also include a 1-800 number on deal vouchers so if there is any dispute with an offer, even one from a partner, consumers can resolve it through Google. That feature, similar to what Yipit already does, will allow Google Offers to route the right deal to users and avoid flooding them with irrelevant offers.
Google Offers is now up to 17 cities after launching in San Jose, San Diego, Baltimore and Minneapolis earlier this week. Nitin Mangtani, Group Product Manager for Google Offers, told me the updates to Google Offers is designed to help the company become more attractive to consumers and merchants. Google has been looking to upgrade its local deals efforts after getting spurned by Groupon last year.
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