Google’s Dealmap buy to boost its mobile commerce strategy

By Chantal Tode

August 3, 2011

Dealmap app aggregates and maps local deals

Google has acquired daily deals provider The Dealmap as it tries to enhance the promotional and commerce elements for Google Offers.

The search giant is actively building out its own daily deals product, Google Offers, while at the same time developing an NFC-based mobile payments solution called Mobile Wallet. The acquisition of Dealmap could help its efforts to gain adoption for these.

“Mobile is a big component of Dealmap and its attraction for Google,” said Peter Krasilovsky, vice president at local media research firm BIA/Kelsey, Chantilly, VA.

“I think we will see a lot of activity as Google tries to make Google Offers about more than daily deals but really about a promotional interface for consumers that will include coupons and transaction capabilities,” he said.

“Dealmap is a good building block for them.”

Deals aggregator
At the beginning of July, The Dealmap reported that it now has more than 2 million users for its branded mobile Web, social and email products and 1 million-plus Android and iPhone mobile installs.

The Dealmap, which announced the acquisition on its company blog, said Google will help it accelerate its growth and innovate in new and unexplored areas of commerce.

Google sees an opportunity with Dealmap to build better commerce-related offerings.

"We are impressed with what The Dealmap team has accomplished and excited to welcome them to Google,” said a Google spokesperson. “We’ve been thrilled with the early success of our commerce offerings, and we think they can help us build even better products and services for consumers and merchants.”

As the popularity of daily deals sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial have grown, so, too, has the number of services that aggregate deals from a number of sources and try to make it easy for consumers to find the best deals. 

The Dealmap is one of these aggregators. Others include Tipper, Yipit and Monster Offers.

“The Dealmap is arguably the largest one of these aggregators,” Mr. Krasilovsky said. “They’ve assembled deals from around the country and add in value by geo-coding and making it easier for users to sort offers in each city.”

Coupon exchange
The Dealmap also built DealExchange for those in the local coupons and deals ecosystem, including publishers, coupon channels, developers and businesses. It includes tools that enable users to reference deals, with premium placement available.

“There are a lot of major companies tapping into their network, including Microsoft Bing and T-Mobile,” Mr. Krasilovsky said.

There are 85 million visitors to The Dealmap’s DealExchange distribution network, according to Dealmap.

Google is likely to integrate Dealmap into its own daily deals product Google Offers.

“The challenges in the deals space include that it is difficult to personalize deals for each person’s interests,” Mr. Krasilovsky said. “If companies like Google can effectively have a large number of deals and target the deals to each customer’s interests, they will have a much higher take rate."

The Dealmap buy could help Google accomplish these goals.

Dealmap could also play a key role for Google as it continues to build out its mobile commerce offerings.

“Dealmap has done a good job of pushing out to mobile – it has over 1 million mobile users today,” Mr. Krasilovsky said.

“This is obviously really important in this space as the next generation of deals will be less about having 24 hours to get a deal and tell your friends about it and more about instant deals,” he said.

“Here again, Dealmap will help Google accomplish this.”

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York