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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google Shuts Down Self Serve Offers Product

Google announced this afternoon that they will be shutting down their Places Dashboard self-serve Offers product.

The product was updated with performance based pricing in the fall of last year and given a new interface in 2012 but like the coupon product upon which it was based, has toiled in obscurity.

The product and the output was actually quite nice. There were two problems with it. Google buried the resultant coupons, never showing them in the mains search results and never promoting the program. The product was renamed Offers in Novemer of 2010. At the time I noted:

Google Coupons had been the Rodney Dangerfield of Google local products, always hidden, never talked about and for years, after anoptimistic start in 2006, they languished.

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Google owns some incredible couponing technology that they purchased in late 2012. Technologies that offer incredible end to end tracking and simple creation that many SMBs would find incredibly valuable.

It is a shame that Google has not yet succeeded in the space. One can only hope that the phoenix will once again rise with new life in some future product.