Google has been rolling out some pretty big features in Adwords over the last week or so. They quietly rolled out Google Offers, available to accounts that upgraded to Enhanced campaigns, enabling advertisers to run their own deals, much like a Groupon Deal and track its effectiveness right in their adwords account.
Adwords Offers Extensions.
There is an interesting article on Search Engine Land that postulates this could be a Groupon Killer.
Personally, I don’t think it will even compete with the Daily Deal space, but will offer some great opportunities for advertisers.
The two big advantages that get me excited are…
1. The opportunity to get more valuable real estate in the Search Results, as well as a Big Bold Button, which can drive increased Click Through Rates, which of course influences Quality Score, can make a big difference for advertisers. I Know that ad extensions are one of my favorite features in adwords, and the ability to get more ad space, along with a more prominent call to action, can not only lend itself to great opportunities, but can free up copy to promote more benefits instead of using a call to action in your ad copy.
2. The other big advantage is the ability to track offline conversion through Google Offers. Coupons were originally invented to track advertising, and now retailers can use Offers to drive foot traffic to their store and map back that conversion to the click… This Advantage Is Huge… Because So Few Brick and Mortar Retailers Use Adwords Effectively To Drive Foot Traffic To Their Retail Locations, and Now They Can Track It Properly With Google Offer Extensions.
Will this become a Groupon Killer, I don’t think so. Groupon worked originally because it was the perfect storm of social psychology. You had scarcity, You Had Social Proof, You had incentive to share, you had everything needed to drive it virally. Groupon also had the massive advantage of Email Lists, which are basically ATMs you can easily tap into to grab some revenues. Groupon was a Brilliant Business Model. The only reasons it is struggling right now is that they diversified too much, and instead of innovating in the Service Business Space, they moved into other product lines, diluting their brand. Also, when you win with discounts and deals eventually you compromise price integrity and nowadays, No one plans a trip, or a massage without quickly checking if any deal sites has a groupon for that service.
Ultimately, there is one very interesting feature that Groupon could have cashed in on, but didn’t that This new Offers Extension has the potential to do. Which is optimizing restaurant pricing and deals based on their availability. In other words, if a Restaurant has a slow day on tuesdays during lunch, they could run a deal just during lunch hour on tuesdays. If they overbought on a dish, they can promote a quick special on that dish. This ability to run hourly sales, or flash sales using Google Offer Extensions can be very exciting if used properly.
How do you plan on using it?
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