Mountain View, California — Relentlessly striving to rule the online world, search engine colossus Google Inc. over the weekend unveiled revolutionary changes to its budding Google Offers daily-deals site into an umbrella offering of sorts, partnering with 14 separate deals providers, as rival Groupon Inc pitches its IPO to potential investors.
Moving forward by expanding its daily deals presence and presenting a new consumer-driven direction by entering into a partnership, Google Offers has added several daily deals aggregators to its mix, along with a personalization quiz to help ward off the so-called deal fatigue afflicting users.
With the new associations, Google jumped over to expand its Google Offers purview that includes more than restaurants, museum and massages, adding offers for outdoor sports, classes and luxury goods from new daily deals providers.
With the new alliances, the search engine company said its Google Offers business will send daily deals emailed Offer. Other new 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.
Additionally, Google is also building up its daily deals network to make Google Offers a target destination for daily deals. In August Google acquired deal site The Dealmap and the company has entered into a partnership with Gilt Groupe’s luxury discount network Gilt City, in its latest move.
To accomplish this, Google partnered with at least 14 deal providers. San Francisco will be the first city eligible for deals under this new partnership, but the company plans to roll out the bigger inventory of deals to new cities in coming months.
Deals from these new partners will appear alongside Google’s own Offers, and once users click on them, they remain within the Offers framework instead of being moved away to the deal sites. Google’s latest deal aggregator property, The Dealmap, helped with the aggregation, though Google declined to say exactly how.
“We are making improvements to Google Offers that help address this challenge,” Nitin Mangtani, a group product manager for Google Offers, wrote in a blog post. “First, we are delivering more amazing deals from a bunch of new categories including outdoor adventure sports, luxury experiences, family-friendly events, classes and more. We are also introducing a personalization quiz to help you find just the deal you want, all in one place.”
Google executives explained that the new Offers were formulated to help users find an expanded range of daily deals in one place. Now, with one account you can easily purchase, manage and redeem all your offers under one roof, added Mangtani.
Google will continue sourcing its own daily deals, but the changes announced last week mean Google can offer a lot more deals without expanding its sales force a lot. However, it is still pretty vague whether the smaller deals providers will get out of the expanded relationship with Google. In a recent conference, Patrick Albus, chief executive of Kgbdeals, ranked his service third behind Groupon and LivingSocial. In a statement, Albus implied that by partnering with Google, his service would gain an extended reach.
“Our alliance with Google Offers is a testimony to the strong following kgbdeals has built through the many communities and merchants we serve,” Albus said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Google to provide an ever-expanding array of high-quality deals, such as those found on the recently launched kgbdeals Shopping and kgbdeals Destinations channels, to millions more customers.”
In fact, the Offers initiative came at a time when Groupon was attracting strong IPO interest. While Groupon’s IPO flare has faded somewhat due to curious accounting and the fact that its growth has slowed, Offers has slowly crept into other cities, from San Francisco and New York City in July, to Baltimore, San Diego and San Jose, Calif., earlier this week.
Besides, Offers is also hampered with new competition from Microsoft Bing, whose own Deals Website aggregates discounts from Groupon, LivingSocial, Nordstrom, Target and many others.
Nevertheless, one thing is abundantly clear: all of these local deals providers are at risk of collapsing to deal fatigue. That requires more selective, targeted offers.
Lastly, to help consumers evaluate 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. Also, the company will likely be sharing revenue from the new offers with the other daily deal sites.
Users can sign up at the Google Offers Web site.