Category: Daily Deals

I am sitting in the SMX West exhibit hall where Gregg Stewart of 15miles is presenting some of the findings of the latest Local Search Usage study conducted in conjunction with Localeze. The survey study consists of a targeted sample of over 4,000 users of local business Internet searchers, broken into 3 search categories – Internet Yellow Pages, Local Search Sites, and Portal Sites. While two of the major findings are pretty obvious: mobile is big and social-local/daily deals is…

My sister-in-law in NYC just got her first Amazon Local Deal and sent me the following note: “This is the first time I have ever gotten something like this from Amazon.  I thought you might find the marketing interesting. The fit with my interests is quite good for an algorithm I’ve never met, but I won’t know until I have gotten a few more to know if it was merely lucky. The fit is more interesting than Amazon or Kindle…

How fitting that I have spent the past two days at BIA/Kelsey’s Deals3D conference. I just hit my 2000th follower on Google Plus. I promised that whomever put me over 2K would get a link with the anchor text of his/her choice. So without further ado: Deals

Reader Kate Raynes-Goldie left this comment on my post The Butchers on Yonge Street: Group Buying Blowback?: The deal that broke north american records is now officially a scam: the butchers have closed their doors indefinitely, for “renovations”: http://www.thebutchersorganic.com/ As you can see from Kate’s comment and my post, a lot of vocal people who bought deal vouchers for The Butchers were not happy with the service and many suspected a scam was afoot. Some of the salient excerpts from…

Google Offers has added a lot of detail about how the program works and tips for participating businesses. Mike B. has excerpted some of the more pertinent info so I thought I’d provide my spin on some of my favorites from the fact sheet: Publicity No photos, please! Er — actually, lots and lots of photos and blog posts and more! Expect there to be a social aspect to your Offer of the Day and be ready to boost your…

During Yipit’s presentation on Group Buying Data at ILMEast this morning James Moran mentioned that a deal from DealFind for The Butchers on Yonge Street in Toronto could have been one of the most successful daily deal offers yet.  The Canadian company offered 69% off meat orders and sold over 11,000 orders which generated over $600,000 in revenue.  That sounded pretty good to me until I stumbled across this thread of angry customers on RedFlagDeals (YPG’s deal site). Some excerpts:…

Thought I’d do some liveblogging of Jim’s talk at ILM East. First a couple of Deal-a-Day forecast nuggets from Bobbi Loy-Luster Volume will increase but growth rates will taper off. $873MM in 2010 daily deal revenues Low forecast = $2B in 2015. High forecast=$6B. Now to Yipit: Yipit aggregates daily deals from a variety of providers. About a month ago they started selling data. Yipit has found over 400 daily deal sites which means there are low barriers of entry.…

Reviews of businesses on Groupon have been spotted on Google Place Pages since January: Last year I speculated that social local applications like Twitter & Foursquare could start to cause a lot of SEO problems for IYPs because they could easily replicate the IYP structure while providing a lot more unique content. Groupon reviews are yet another data source that will siphon search traffic away from traditional local directories. An IYP-like directory of businesses in every city that are running…

Was reading this piece over at Greg’s blog about how Google is going to spend $100MM to get SMBs to use Adwords and the wording on this image kind of made me think of Groupon: 50% off (spend $100 and get $200 of value) Limited time only First one million businesses only Ok, maybe it’s a stretch #TGIF #itsablog Test: Albert Nahman Plumbing and Heating

Closely, Perry Evans new “live social marketing” start-up, just launched GroupGro, a blog that provides SMBs with guides for navigating the daily deal space. Should be interesting to see how GroupGro and Closely relate to each other over time. When Perry mentioned GroupGro to me a couple of months ago, I thought it was a great idea given how much noise there was in the daily deal space. Tweet