Since Google’s new CEO Larry Page took over last year, Google has been doing extremely well and has been launching all sorts of new products. Some of these improvements consist of reorganizing the Google management structure for more efficiency, the launch of Google+ and finally, the launch of Google Offers. These accomplishments have earned Larry Page the honor of “CEO of the Year”. Today, I will take a look into Google’s newest product; Google Offers.
Google Offers was put in place to compete with other daily deal companies like Groupon and Living Social. The product offered by Google is similar because they offer deals of 50% off or more, the deals are sent to you by email, and you have to opt-in to be able to get these deals. This means that Google will not automatically sign you up for Google Offers, just because you have a Google account.
Google Offer’s was launched in June of 2011 but was only launched in the test market city of Portland. Only a month later, it was then launched in New York City, San Francisco and Oakland. Apparently these test cities did very well because in September of 2011, Google Offers was launched in Austin, Washington D.C., Boston, Denver and Seattle. Today, Google Offers can now be found in over 40 different cities throughout the United States and it is still growing.
One thing many users have noticed is that Google did not integrate Google Offers with any of the other Google Products like Google Maps or Gmail. This could create a much more effective way for business to promote their daily deal offers. Most users expect this to be the next step the Google Offers takes. Should this integration take place, it would be a great business strategy for business owners to post these daily deals on their Google Maps pages.
However, it hasn’t been all rainbows and butterflies for Google Offers thus far. In late November, 2011, Google Offers promoted a deal for newegg.com. Spend $20 for $40 worth of Newegg credit. Newegg.com is a popular techie site for electronic and other computing equipment, and as you would expect, the techies jumped all over this “free money”. In fact, so many users tried to sign up for this deal, that it nearly froze up the Google Offers server. Thousands of users were seeing error messages when they attempted to purchase this offer. Some eventually got the offer to go through, whereas some were not able to get the offer in time because of this problem, which lead to many complaints. It’s troublesome to think about what would happen if they offer such a good deal like this at a popular clothing store. Google later released a statement stating “We are aware of this issue and we are looking into it”.
Finally, in late 2011, Google Offers released an android app so that these deals are easily accessible and users can finds these deals on the fly. It remains to be seen how Google offers will differentiate themselves from the rest of the daily deals companies, but if I were to put my money on it, I would suggest that they incorporate these daily deals with Google Maps for ultimate convenience for the users and business owners.
– Mike Fedotowsky
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