Foursquare Will Enter The Deals Market Soon, Google Maps Already There

There’s an interesting process that happens over the online deal industry recently- While the traditional daily deal service providers are slowly declining, real-time and location based offers services are gaining momentum, signaling on a major change in consumers’ expectations and behavior.

I already reported that Facebook is entering the deals arena with the gradual roll out of Offers and that the Groupon Now! product might be the (only) future of the leading daily deal company, but lately, two more services have demonstrated their intention to join the new real-time and social offers age- Foursquare and Google Maps.

Foursquare: Coupon Ads In July

In an interview to the Wall Street Journal, Foursquare’s founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, revealed that the location-based social networking company intends to implement new type of special promotions ads into the next version of the company’s mobile app, which will launch in July.

This statement also aligns with the prior reports that Foursquare will introduce its own advertising platform in June and it will most likely to include coupons, special offers and a promotion features for the service’s more than 750,000 businesses and over 20 million users.

Today, Foursquare already giving businesses the opportunity to promote their special offers on their venue pages for free. However, the new coupon ads will provide businesses the possibility to target customers by themselves based on their current location and check-in history.

So far, Foursquare has been struggling with efficient monetization method of its relatively big community. Coupon ads based on location certainly strikes like a good way to finally generate some significant revenue for the company.

Google Maps: Discover Nearby Offers

Google announced that it is adding to its popular Maps service for Android a new offers feature on the service’s 6.7 release update, which will allow users in the U.S. to discover nearby deals. The deals feature will be powered by the company’s deals service, Google Offers.

The two products integration appears to have a big potential to grow together (in theory at least). Many users are already using Google Maps and they probably won’t miss the chance to score some promotion or special offer while using it. For merchants, it can turn into a great opportunity to allure customers to their businesses.

Finding offers on Google Maps is pretty simple- On the top dropdown menu click on Offers and you would see all the available deals near your current location. It is also possible to receive push notification or email whenever a business is offering some deal nearby.

More information can be found in the following video: