Google Offers 2 Weeks On – The Local Vantage Point

Not being well versed in the deals arena I wanted to better understand Google’s baby steps with their Offers product. I turned to a number of respected folks, that have more experience in the field than I to get their sense of Google’s progress in their newest local effort. Here is the discussion thread from …

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Google Maps Returns My Maps As My Places

Plamen Barzev, Nyagoslav Zhekov and Nikola Tsvetkov (you gotta love Local, bringing users from all over the world together) all alerted me during the early hours of the morning that Google Maps has replaced the My Maps with the apparently very useful My Places. My Places is a personalized view of every review AND map that a …

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Google Places Blended Results – Photos MIA

UPDATE 4:00 pm: I sent the following inquiry off to Carer Maslan this morning: “I see that today ALL photos and graphics are missing from local blended results on the main search results page. This search showed photos Sunday/Monday but not today. Is this a new  normal?”  His answer: Yes, but as you know, the “normal” is …

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Google Calendar Appointment Slots – Infrastructure for Places Scheduling?

Places and similar products have slowly been moving towards becoming a transaction environment. Last November Google rolled out, on a limited basis, a hotel booking feature. In December, Bing introduced a restaurant reservation system on their Place page equivalent. This spring when Google added rich snippet events to the Places page, they integrated the ability  to …

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Google Offers Beta – Status Update

Google Offer’s Beta in Portland started on June 1 and there have been 5 deals in total to this point. Here is a summary of the deals to date: Date Co./URL Deal % off Purchase  Window Avail. Sold 6/1 Floyd’s Coffee $3 for $10 work of food 70% 15 hrs 2000 1709 6/2 Uptown Billiards …

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Highlights from the Google Offer Business Help Files

The help files for Google Offers have also been expanded to now include actual details about the program. I have abstracted some of the highlights: Participation Requirements To participate in Google Offers, you … should be financially stable, and must have positive customer reviews. Concerns about meeting demand Google will pay you 80% of your share …

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Place Pages Sporting New Navigation Features

Yam Regev has pointed out several new navigation capabilities on a business’s Place page that allows users to more easily move through a list of Places returned from a Google Maps search result. The feature is only visible when a Place Page has been accessed via the list view resulting from a Map search and …

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The Growth of Reviews In Google Places (aka Hotpot)

  It was apparent to me in early January that the introduction of Google Hotpot was leading to vast increase in Google’s review/rating corpus. I was seeing reviews and ratings in industries and geographic areas that had not seen Google originated reviews and seeing them frequently. To get a better handle on this trend I …

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