Google Tweaks Its Daily Deals Service With New Partners and Personalization
Microsoft’s Bing has been aggregating daily deals from Groupon, LivingSocial and the plethora of their high- and low-end niche clones for months now. It looks as if Google, which runs its own Google Offers service, too, is moving more towards aggregation now, too. Starting in San Francisco, Google Offers now aggregates deals from Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, Juice in the City, kgbdeals, Mamapedia,Plum District, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR and zozi. This, according to Google, will allow its users to easily purchase deals from all of these services with just one account (using Google Checkout, of course). Google plans to roll this service out to more cities “in the months to come.”
An End to Irrelevant Deals
In addition, Google is also adding some personalization features to Offers. After taking a short quiz (asking you if you want to get offers related to pets, for example), you will never have to see another offer for a portrait session or glass blowing class from Google Offers again. Google Offers is currently available in 17 cities.
Indeed, the fact that most of the offers I’ve been receiving lately have been completely irrelevant to me (really? another massage with aromatherapy?) has made me unsubscribe from quite a few deals services lately. Adding personalization – especially now that Google is working with more partners – simply makes sense and may just make daily deals a bit more relevant to many users as well.
Are Daily Deals Slowly Fizzling Out?
Overall, it feels as if the daily deals market is slowly contracting as the novelty wears off and users start to get tired of the daily barrage of emails with offers for cheap yoga sessions, weight-loss packages, mattresses and pizza (that’s the last five days of LivingSocial deals in my area right there). Maybe by targeting offers a bit better than others, Google can reverse this trend for a while, but I doubt we will ever see a return of the Groupon mania of early 2011.