Google Commerce last week introduced Zavers by Google, a coupon/transaction marketing management and loyalty rewards service that it purchased last November. Using Zavers, shoppers find offers on their websites and save them to their Zavers account. The offers are then automatically redeemed in real time when shoppers present their reward cards, mobile wallets or type-in …

This morning at ILM West in Los Angeles, Google’s head of Global SMB Sales Todd Rowe offered “Five Trends that Will Affect you in 2013.”
Rowe is leading the charge at Google to build a global re-seller network to offer Google products to small-business advertisers. To date, Rowe and his team has lined up 350 partners …

When eBay purchased Jack Abraham’s Milo.com in December 2010, it caused some head scratching. While retail Inventory is helpful to track goods availability and has some value in developing location-based promotions, it seemed an unlikely anchor for eBay’s SMB and local ecommerce services.
Abraham’s upgrade of his title to head of EBay Local last year, however, …

A study commissioned by YP Holdings (formerly AT&T interactive and AT&T Ad Solutions) has concluded that phone calls generated from listings distributed on YP.com and its Local Ad Network outperformed those sourced from Google Ad Words, as measured by cost per call.
The study contends that cost per call on ads served by YP ranged from …

Google is adding Wildfire to its social-oriented suite of business services, paying “about $250 Million,” according to a source cited by The Wall Street Journal. The San Francisco-based company provides social media analytics for 16,000 customers, ranging from large SMBs to major brands such as Amazon, Unilever and Virgin.
Wildfire launched in 2008 as a self-serve …

Elevation Partners‘ Roger McNamee — friend of Bono’s, the lead in the failed resurrection of Palm and a winner in the Facebook IPO to the tune of $1.5 billion — is known as a contrarian thinker. He did not disappoint in a keynote address yesterday at the San Diego Venture Group’s annual summit.
His main …

Google Offers has just celebrated its first anniversary and now has a presence in 40 markets, says Group Products Manager Nitin Mangtini, who was speaking Tuesday at the Street Fight Summit West conference in San Francisco.
Mangtini, who also spoke at BIA/Kelsey’s ILM East in March, stressed that Offers has gone far beyond a homogenous daily …

Zagat is Google’s great equalizer against Yelp. Google has now demonstrated why it paid $151 million for Zagat last September by including Zagat, which formerly cost $4.95 a month (or $24.95 per year), as part of its new rollout of Google+ Local. The newly branded service replaces Google Places.
As a result of the integration, which …

Google made up 66.5 percent of the U.S. market share in explicit core search in April, a 0.1 percentage point rise from the previous month, according to comScore’s qSearch analysis. Microsoft came in second at 15.4 percent and Yahoo rounded out the top 3 at 13.5 percent, slipping 0.2 percentage points.

ComScore excludes contextual searches from …

Google has been taking out major newspaper ads to promote its new “Get Your Business Online” initiative, a partnership with Intuit that lets SMBs claim a place and update information and also provides a free website. It is a strong effort to get more SMBs online, and buying services. More than 14 states are up …

Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers, which is playing a major role in Google’s vital local strategy, along with Google Places, …

Yelp is IPOing today at $15 a share, allowing it to raise $123 million on a valuation of $900 million — $400 million more than it was apparently offered by Google a couple of years ago.
We know from the S-1 that Yelp earned $58.4 million in net revenues in the first nine months of 2011, …

Business-to-business companies are catering to a growing crop of decision-makers who are turning to the Internet for purchase information according to data from Marin Software. The average cost per click in the B2B paid search space increased 29 percent from Q4 2010 to Q4 2011.
According to additional data from Compete and Google, we’ll continue to …

ILM East is coming back to Boston March 26-28 with a lineup of doers and innovators who are transforming and redefining the local space. Highlights include a featured keynote from industry legend Ted Leonsis (Groupon vice chair/AmEx board member/sports team owner/AOL mastermind), along with keynotes/interviews from Jason Calacanis, Leslie Berland, Jay Herratti, Michael Zimbalist and …

Google’s local efforts have grown tremendously under the direction of Marissa Mayer, and now encompass a wide range of products, including Google Maps; Google Places; Zagat; Google Offers; and Get Online, a new SMB initiative.
At ILM West this week in San Francisco, Head of Local Consumer Marketing Jeff Aguero provided a rich portrait of Google’s …

Google has experienced five times growth in mobile search during the past two years, according to Google Mobile’s Surojit Chatterjee, who was keynoting our SoLoMo Morning at ILM West in San Francisco.
Mobile usage generally complements the desktop, with huge spikes on the weekend and in the evening and at lunch, said Chatterjee. “When people go …

How many small businesses have done a deal at this point? Twelve percent, according to a new survey of 2,500 SMBs by MerchantCircle. That’s about a third higher than MerchantCircle’s June survey.
The survey also found a lot of Facebook ad usage. About 23 percent of local merchants report having tried Facebook Ads to date, …

Yelp’s S-1, which was issued last week as a run-up to a $100 million IPO, reveals a lot of new data about the reviews leader. The big question about Yelp has been whether it can grow against increased pressure from Google, and also begin to take market share away from traditional media players such as …

Google’s march into local reached another milestone today with the acquisition of Zagat, a major international provider of high-end restaurant and lifestyle reviews in 100-plus cities.
Zagat remains a major player in a reviews space it pioneered in 1979. In addition to hosting its patented “30 point” reviews from some 350,000 “surveyors,” Zagat has a print, …

Google has acquired Dealmap, a deals aggregator and exchange, and will presumably use it to complement its own sourcing of deals for Google Offers, the daily deal site now in New York, the Bay Area and Portland and coming soon to Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Terms were not disclosed.
Dealmap, a 15-person company, …