Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We’ll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he is keynoting. But there are now countless imitators adding their own deals.

New York-based 8Coupons.com, which aggregates coupons from content partners such as Valpak, Money Mailer and RedPlum’s SuperCoups, has now put them all together in one spot (great idea). 8Coupons launched the top 10 U.S. cities last month, and now has 55 different Group Buying “Deals of the Day” Web sites in 100 cities. Based on what we are hearing around the industry, many more sites are likely to enter the space soon.

I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Reynolds, CEO of Mongoose Metrics, a Cleveland, Ohio-based call measurement and conversion analytics company. Reynolds was quick to point out that it is not simply a call tracking company, but rather it is dedicated to linking online and offline conversion so clients can better understand what leads to sales conversions. According to Reynolds, “Our business is based around illuminating the sales funnel related to offline conversions. Our goal is to make it easy to track online and offline conversions side-by-side. We want to drive actions like tweaking marketing spend and efforts with a full basket of information.”

While some companies focus entirely on online conversions, the reality, according to Mongoose Metrics, is that a large majority of transactions occur offline via the phone. In most cases there is a chain of events that lead to an offline conversion. By better understanding how online and offline media influence the conversion path, marketers have a better sense of what media and messages they should be using to maximize their effectiveness. With good offline and online conversion data in hand, brands can personalize their messages across media to create a conversation and a stronger relationship.

Mongoose Metrics has also been busy putting together an effective international local number tracking network and recently put together deals in Canada and the U.K. to deliver true local exchange numbers across both countries. Rather than relying on VoIP numbers or toll-free numbers, Mongoose is now able to offer local telephone numbers better linking businesses to their local area. “Until recently, it had been nearly impossible for Canadian and U.K. companies to use local phone numbers to follow visitors from Web-to-phone to understand how their Web sites drive phone calls and ultimately sales,” according to Reynolds. Mongoose Metrics’ move into the U.K. and Canada is a first step in expanding internationally.

When asked where call measurement is headed in the near term, Reynolds quickly pointed to mobile. “While many feel there will be transactions handled on the handset, the current reality is that most sites are not fully enabled for mobile screens, requiring too many clicks and too much scrolling. People want to get a quick answer to their question and often will revert to contacting the store or company since it is easier — and they have a phone in their hand to expedite the need for information. Click-to-call features makes sense on the mobile Web and will offer yet another layer in understanding where offline conversions are initiated.”

When asked about other developments, Reynolds replied, “Mongoose is currently working on a few proprietary products to provide deeper analytics of incoming calls and hopes to create a way to trigger specific actions tied to a recognized set of keywords. This is yet another step Mongoose is taking to help drive conversions and personalize the communication between consumers and advertisers.”

Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional partners.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is live, and other newspapers and local media companies are anticipated as partners in coming months. Allmenus.com is the second brand from parent company Dotmenu.com. The original brand was Campusfood.com, which brings online ordering to college students.

Allmenus’ media partnerships involve co-branding and promotional advertising, potentially including display, direct, e-mail and social media. They also involve contextual integrated content. While they notably don’t involve the papers in sales, the papers receive a minority share of local market revenues. Revenues are derived from online food ordering, advertising and monthly maintenance fees.

Allmenus Chief Revenue Officer Tony Wills, a former exec with Quigo, Newsday and R.H. Donnelley, says the company determined that local markets had to be launched one at a time to be truly successful — even though it has good distribution via Google and Yahoo Local. Newspapers still have the online brand and promotional power to best drive local awareness and sales, he says, despite their drop-offs in penetration and usage. Newspapers also appreciate Allmenus as a “content” service since it strives to have the most comprehensive set of menus in each market — something it handles with local feet on the street, and fly-in teams.

Under terms of the partnerships, Allmenus widgets for online ordering will be featured in specific contextual parts of newspaper sites, including sports, local, weather and business. While it would seem to make sense to have newspapers also handle local sales, Wills says that it wouldn’t really work because newspaper sales staffs are paid on commissions.

A primary reason it wouldn’t work is that Allmenus takes no money upfront. Instead, it charges a transaction fee that is a little over 10 percent.  It takes 11.5 percent, or $5.75, out of a $50 order, for instance. “If there is no revenue, there is no sale,” says Wills.

In any case, newspapers may have trouble committing the resources in today’s environment. “Newspapers are under siege,” says Wills. “They can’t commit the resources. They need it to be turn-key.”

There is a role for newspaper sales reps, however — to build awareness for the Allmenus service. “It makes the print sale” for restaurants more valuable because of added awareness and usage, says Wills. Indeed, online ordering is a big piece of the restaurant landscape. Pizza Hut is getting 30 percent of its sales online. Moreover, online boosts the amount of sales — online orders are 10 percent higher than in-person orders because it is so easy to check off additional or more expensive items. Ultimately, however, it is a different ballgame than brand and awareness advertising.

Serial Web entrepreneur Mark H. Goldstein  has been the founder of such sites as Kmart’s BlueLight and Impulse Buy. More recently, he invested in green ecology-based ventures, but he grew bored and came back to ecommerce with Loyalty Lab and  Home-Account.com, which matched homeowners with mortgage brokers, competing with the likes of LendingTree , Bankrate.com and Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace (whose free to the consumer model is similar).

Today, Goldstein launched a sister site, Refinance.com, which is using the same engine as Home-Account to match refinance prospects with the lowest “TrueCost” loan over time.   Both services rely on a matching system developed with Jack M. Guttenberg, better known as “The Mortgage Professor.” They also collect recommendations and reviews, marrying social networking with leads.

Goldstein contends that the free matching service is far superior to lead generation sites such as Lending Tree, which provide consumers with lists of five or six brokers.  That doesn’t help consumers much, he argues. They’re almost as poorly informed as when they started.

“We’re getting rid of the ‘last mile human being’ and pinpointing exactly the right product,” says Goldstein, noting that consumers will still have an option to self-select their brokers. “They don’t have to take the first one, the second or third.”

The site is currently launching local and regional lenders, with hundreds of lenders ready to sign on.  Goldstein’s timing, however, would appear to be shaky, with many banks still very conservative in their lending practices, post TARP mode.

But  Goldstein contends  “they do want to lend,” and notes that real estate has been in recovery for the past six months. Lending Tree has been doing good business, for example. And Bankrate.com was just taken private in October for $700 million.

“There are very specific people they want to lend to,” says Goldstein.  “What we do is make you look as good as possible before the lender picks up the phone. “

Sears is loath to invest in its physical stores but has built a collection of “shop your way” online and mobile services as a high margin substitute, according to an article on WSJ.com. The article notes that Sears’ e-commerce division boasts 180 employees, and has boosted its revenues by “double digits” in the past two years with products like MyGofer and Sears Marketplaces, earning $2.7 billion, or 6 percent of total company sales.

Sears Marketplace, similar to other marketplaces established by Amazon and eBay (and coming soon from Wal-Mart), collects commissions of 7 percent to 20 percent from retail partners. The division, however, recently lost Online President Jim Barr, who had been recruited in 2008 from Microsoft. Moreover, no mention is made of ServiceLive,  a ServiceMagic-like home-and-trade leads service launched in beta last year.

Three years ago, BIA/Kelsey created the Marketplaces research program and conference because we saw that local advertising was quickly “verticalizing.” Indeed, money and talent have poured in for the new breed of vertical products that would take their place among existing vertical success stories, such as AutoTrader, Cars.com, Realtor.com and ServiceMagic.

The Marketplaces 2010 conference reveals just how fast the industry has evolved. This year’s event, now under construction, is set to highlight all the major trends in Marketplaces, including:

• AOL’s $50 million investment in Patch.com, and ongoing transformation of its Mediaglow vertical properties (and Mapquest)
• eBay’s renewed efforts to build up classifieds as entry-level e-commerce via Kijiji, eBay Motors and other services
• Examiner.com’s  big bet on local/vertical content, and its network of 26,000 “examiners.”
• Groupon’s “smart mob” theory of local commerce, backed by a $32 million investment, that allows hundreds to make a volume purchase of local services and products.
• Redbeacon, AlikeList and others’ efforts to remake ServiceMagic-like home and trade leads with social media
• Adify and Pulse360’s  bid to verticalize ad networks for local merchants and national brands
• OpenTable’s big bet on mobile to let diners make reservations wherever they are.

The two-day conference takes full advantage of its location in sunny San Diego. It includes rich research presentations, top-flight demos of the latest services, and a preconference showcasing all the best tools of Marketplaces 2010. Come to San Diego March 22-24 to learn, enjoy the unbeatable networking and participate. You can register at early-bird rates here.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS (in Alpha)

• Ethan Anderson, CEO, Redbeacon
• Jeff Beard, CEO, Localeze
• Rick Blair, CEO, Examiner.com
• Jon Brod, EVP, AOL*
• Craig Donato, CEO, Oodle
• Jim Delli Santi, CEO, AlikeList
• Todd Dubner, SVP, NCI
• Russ Fradin, CEO, Adify
• Krista Glotzbach, VP, Vast.com
• Mark Goldstein, Chairman, Loyalty Labs
• Martin Herbst, GM, Kijiji U.S., eBay
• Scott Jampol, Senior Director, Marketing, OpenTable
• Jaan Janes, CEO, Pulse 360
• David Kidder, CEO, Clickable
• Steve Larsen, CEO, CallSpark
• Andrew Mason, CEO, GroupOn*
• Colin Pape, CEO, ShopCity
• Ben Saren, CEO, CitySquares
• Craig Smith, President, ServiceMagic
• Mat Stover, CEO, Local Matters
• David Vazdauskas, President, Local Thunder

*keynote

CitySquares, an online city guide and directory company based in Boston, has acquired the assets of Yokel, which provides online retail services and maintains a database of 2 million retailers. Terms weren’t disclosed. The combination should work well with CitySquares’ recent turn toward national/local operations.

Fees for Yokel, whose tagline is “all shopping, all local,” start at $7.95 a month. Retailers using the service get a free storefront, assorted marketing tools, and listings on search engines and on Yokel’s own shopping directory. The site was started by Scott Randall, former CEO of FairMarket, an early eBay competitor that later focused on B2B retail auctions. Randall will work with CitySquares as a consultant.

According to The Boston Business Journal, CitySquares, which has some backing by Mark Cuban and Jonathan Kraft (i.e., the family behind Gillette), says it expects to be cash flow positive in 90 days and will be hiring again after weathering the tough climate of 2009.

Lately, we’ve been hearing more about  shopping search start-up Spreezio, a kind of Priceline for merchandise (TechCrunch profiles it today). In other words, you name the price that represents the threshold at which you’d buy, and then see who bites.

This could come at the right time as we’re seeing more services that give greater control to consumers to dictate pricing. Groupon is a quickly growing service that carries this general theme, and TechCrunch 50 winner Redbeacon lets consumers send job offers to local service providers.

As with the above examples, one challenge is that it can only be as good as the number of merchants that are using the system and responding to offers. So far, the company has reportedly signed up “over 100″ merchants including Macy’s and Best Buy.

The chain-centric approach isn’t surprising nor a new challenge in the local shopping space: inventory data providers such as Krillion and ShopLocal have each tackled the decidedly easier “single point of entry” that is national retailers.

Mid-market and SMB segments will continue to be a challenge, no matter how enticing an offering is.  Incidentally, it does seem to have some enticement as a lead source. Low barrier too; merchants pay Spreezio a percentage of conversions — something Krillion has indicated to be of interest to electronics retailers.

But another issue is that the differences in adoption among store managers could result in an uneven quality experience (will they manage it on an ongoing basis?). They’ll also be attracted based on usage, which in turn hinges on the quality/comprehensiveness for users … chicken and egg … blah, blah, blah.

On the other hand, it could be the right macroeconomic environment for this sort of offering to gain consumer traction. One wonders why it didn’t make a bigger splash six weeks ago. We’ll give it time to prove out.

Verticals that can engage certain demographics on a socio/geo basis and drive loyalty and conversion are the basis of our Marketplaces research program.  A new one that has caught our eye is WineTwits from HappyHours.com founder Steve Gilberg.  Three years ago, HappyHours and Lawn and Garden Search were among the first verticals that made us think there was another side to marketplaces beyond the big classified categories.

Gilberg tells us that the development of WineTwits started a year ago when his team was fooling around with Twitter to see what it could do for the online wine retailers that he works with. “We quickly had a few thousand followers, and we were moving cases of wine. In one 24-hour period, we sold $16,000 of wine,” he says.

As the site comes out of beta, it now has 45,000 followers. It is currently poised to promote wine more aggressively, and work local channels to promote wine stores, specials and wine events. “Our business model is to create a platform that will organize conversations around wine,” says Gilberg.

The WineTwits platform is essentially made up of two products: “WineTwits Mobile” and “WineTwits Live.”  Mobile allows event planners, retailers and restaurants to create lists of wines being tasted at specific events, and build a feedback community,  like a specialized version of Foursquare. WineTwits Live allows event producers to project the tweets on screen, and upload interstitial advertising.

The platform has already been applied in November at The City Winery event in New  York, where it was called “Spit and Twit.” The company  is also in discussion to apply the tech for the San Francisco Vintners Market event in April.

The ultimate vision, says Gilberg, is to apply lessons from the WineTwits experience to several adjacent products.  “CigarTwits,” “RumTwits” and “TequilaTwits” are all on the horizon.

In a wide-ranging interview this afternoon at ILM:09, ILM Program Director and conference chair Matt Booth tried several times to pin the Yelp COO, Geoff Donaker to the mat. But the unflappable and diplomatic Donaker just wasn’t going to go there.

Donaker spoke with surprising humility about Yelp’s phenomenal growth, from around 14-15 million uniques in late 2008 to some 26 million uniques last month. He emphasized Yelp’s focus on “Quality over quantity” when it comes to building their inventory of reviews. He highlighted their “one city at a time” growth strategy, which seems almost counter-intuitive in our era of buzz-driven hockey stick growth expectations.

In fact, Donaker maintained that it is exactly this ‘go slow’ approach that is responsible for Yelp’s success and staying power in the review/social network space.

For the data hounds out there, Donaker offered up some juicy stats, e.g:

-Restaurant reviews comprise 29% of Yelp’s inventory of reviews

-Reviews of various retail establishments comprise about another 22%

-Reviews of nightlife venues are (surprisingly) small

-Many Yelp reviewers post reviews in multiple categories – effectively using Yelp as their “lifestyle blog”

-Yep now has “community managers” in about 33 metro areas in the US and selected international markets

-Yelp has about 300 employees total, of which about 200 are client-facing

-They have over 100 partners who republish Yelp’s content (with permission)

And finally, back to Donaker’s diplomatic style:

Booth asked several questions about competitors, such as Google with its Favorite Place program (scannable window stickers for businesses that when scanned from an appropriate mobile device, take the user to the Google location with business profile and other information on that business). Booth also asked about AOL’s announced intention operate local sites in 100 US communities, in direct competition with Yelp.

To these questions, Donaker’s response was, in so many words “this continent is big enough for all of us”.