Earlier this week, Google Offers added new personalization features to figure out what you like by asking what types of offers you’d like to receive, and where exactly you hang out the most. The first section focuses on things to do, places to go, shopping, health & beauty and services. The second portion is all about where you hang out, whether that’s specific neighborhoods within a city or various cities across the country. It also asks you where you work and where you live. The last step in the sign-up process includes looking at a few sample emails based on your submitted preferences in order to see if those offers are of interest to you. Google Offers launched in Portland in June 2011, and had expanded to the Bay Area and New York City by July. In September, it added five more cities. Google Offers is now live in 12 cities nationwide.
What Location Means for the Daily Deals Space
In May 2011, Groupon launched Groupon Now, a service that uses your location to find real-time, on-demand deals at local establishments that are available for only a few hours and don’t “tip” like traditional Groupon deals. This was achieved through a partnership with Loopt, and put Groupon squarely in the mobile and location spaces. At the end of July, Groupon partnered with Foursquare on the Groupon Now deals, integrating them into the Foursquare app’s “Explore” tab.
Google first jumped into the location-based daily deals space with its purchase of The Dealmap, which aggregates local offers, presenting them on a Google-powered map. This tied in quite well with Google Latitude, which offers consumers an unsocial way to check-in and score deals without ever having to tell their friends what they’re up to. As is evident with the recent launch of Foursquare’s Radar feature, location is edging toward push notifications over check-ins. Google Offers is quite the opposite of pushy – and their quite step toward personalized offers that are only sent when there’s something of interest might actually be the quieter, smarter way to engage consumers.
