Category: Groupon

Groupon made a big splash a couple of days ago by announcing the launch of Merchant Pages. Merchant Pages is an attempt by Groupon to leverage their daily deal ecosystem and channel local businesses into a local directory type site similar to Yelp. As it relates to the local search space, a new business listing on a brand like Groupon does have the potential to provide value to a businesses online search presence. Also, the listings look pretty nice and…

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…

We’re back at C3 and starting out with “A Conversation With the Networks”: Doug Kilponen, SVP Biz Dev, Merchant Circle John Kim, VP, Products, Pelago Sumir Meghani, Director BD, Groupon Jed Nachman, VP Sales, Yelp Kim – If you can create content and connect with other people, it’s social media Meghani – Groupon has two types of social interactions – between businesses and consumers (the deal) and between consumers (getting each other to hit the tipping point for the deal).…

Glenn Gabe just pinged me that he is now seeing Groupon showing up in Google Place SERPs: According to Glen, this sucks for Groupon advertisers because: All of the Groupons I came across were expired. That’s right, when you click through the link in the clustered results, you end up at the Groupon page for the business (with the expired discount staring you in the face.) Imagine a customer searching for a spa treatment, finding your Groupon page (where you…

Inspired by John Battele’s scoring of his 2010 predictions I figured I’d see how I did with my 2010 Local SEO Predictions: The Open Source Yellow Pages Will Emerge Let’s see – Citysearch turned into CityGrid and is now supplying yellow pages data/ads to anyone who wants it.  YPG launched its Yellow API strategy.  A slew of Local Search APIs came out.  I could go on, but let’s just call it a +1 (It’s All About) GOOGLE The launch of…

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

With all of the hubbub around how Groupon might not necessarily be such a great thing for small businesses, my friend Seth Gardenswartz of SpaBoom alerted me that they are going to be hosting a webinar on how to “roll your own Groupon.” It sounds like its worth checking out. I particularly like their take on “Intelligent Discounting”: Create a discount program that will deliver a brand value for potential clients, and a high ROI for the spa/salon. Avoid directly…

The sad tale of Posies Cafe’s experience with Groupon, Groupon in Retrospect, shows the dangers of offering heavily discounted services to an unlimited supply of customers.  While I think the majority of the fault lies with Posies not really thinking through the implications of the promotion, it also seems like Groupon’s sales rep was all too eager to walk them off the edge of the cliff. I spoke with John, a Groupon rep, and we started formulating the idea. He…