Tag Archives: vancouver

Groupon Hits $1M in Gross Revenue in Canada

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Groupon - Daily Deals - Canada - Toronto - VancouverChicago based Groupon which started selling its daily deals in Canada on April 19 in Toronto and on April 26 in Vancouver has hit the $1M in gross revenues over this past weekend (Saturday morning roughly). This is according to my tracking document and not an official release from the company.

Some other interesting facts about their first 2-months in Canada:

Toronto represents 51% of their Groupons Sold, while Vancouver is at 49% of the total sales volume
In terms of gross revenues, Toronto is 52.6%, Vancouver at 47.4% of gross revenue.
In terms of savings to consumers – Groupon has saved consumers $1.56M during this time.

With respect to ComScore traffic, they started to register in February of this year and are a good upward trend, breaking the 200K UV mark in May.

Groupon - Comscore - Media Tracking

Are Canadians Checking In?

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There is no doubt about it, if you follow the online local space that Check-In is “In” for 2010. A recent article on Mashable, “Foursquare’s Growth Not Slowing Down: 725,000 Users, 22 Million Checkins” definitely proves the point for this 1-year old startup organization.

In February I did a post on my FourSquare experience that you can read on my initial experiences and the impact on local.

A couple of days, one of my work colleagues, Mohamed Kahlain, follow him on Twitter, sent me the link to CheckIn Mania, a mashup that features checkins from FourSquare, GoWalla and Britekite. This was originally posted on Mashable.

In a nutshell what CheckIn Mania does is allows you to enter any city, click on the map and select a business. Once you select a business you can see who is the mayor of that place + how many checkins to that business and any tips. You also have the ability to select the “Search by Map” which is a neat feature that allows you to move the map and the locations update as opposed to updating the locations by click.

Here is the screenshot with one of my favorite restaurants (of which I am in the Mayor in Calgary) called Spicy Hut.

Check In Mania for Calgary and Spicy Hut

It is no secret that any of the location based services listed above have the highest penetration in major US markets like San Francisco and New York, but what about Canada?

Are Canadians checking in?

So I decided to spot check some businesses in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal to see how active Canadian’s are. I decided to focus on Restaurants. My selection criteria for which restaurants and spas to choose was as following, In Google I did a local search and selected business #3 in their 7-pack. In YellowPages.ca, I selected the #8 business and in Yelp.ca I selected business #6. This would give me a random sample of businesses. I also limited this to FourSquare as this is the most popular check-in service.

Here are my findings.

Vancouver Restaurants:
C Restaurant (selected from Google) – 9 checkins
Tojo’s Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 33 checkins
Top Of Vancouver Revolving Restaurant (selected from Yellowpages.ca) – 17 checkins

Calgary Restaurants
Calgary Marriott Hotel (selected from Google) – 21 checkins
Capo Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 5 checkins
Karma Fine Indian Cuisine (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 2 checkins

Toronto Restaurants
Bistro 990 Restaurant (selected from Google, this is actually listing #4) – 11 checkins
Pomegranate Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 8 checkins
The Real Jerk (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 34 checkins

Montreal Restaurants
Restaurant Toqué (selected from Google) – 5 checkins
Santos (selected from Yelp, actually #8) – 40 checkins
Arahova Souvlaki (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 15 checksin

The only thing that surprised me about the above results is Toronto. I would have expected to Toronto to come in closer to Montreal in terms of checkins because of population concentration and smartphone penetration. However, this might be a result of the fact that Toronto does not have the density of Montreal (land mass to population size), which might also explain why Vancouver is more comparative to Montreal. Calgary actually holds it own, relative to its population size and the fact that Calgary.

Although comparatively to the US, Canada is not at the 1/10 rule (see some US results below), it is pretty clear to me that Canadians in the large urban markets have started to embrace checkin. This group, like in the US, are the ones at the start of the product curve and the big question going forward is whether checkin services will hit mass adoption.

How does this compare to the top US cities. Here are the results for San Francisco and New York using the same process as above. I used YellowPages.com as the 3rd source.

San Francisco Restaurants
Zuni Cafe (selected from Google) – 459 checkins
R & G Lounge (selected from Yelp) – 296 checkins
Cote Sud (selected from YellowPages.com) – 6 checkins

New York Restaurants
Spring Street Natural Restaurant (selected from Google) – 495 checkins
La Sirene (selected from Yelp) – 52 checksin
Serendipity 3 (selected from YellowPages.com) – 236 checkins

The Weather Network add Local Search and YellowPages.ca adds Weather – A Deeper Look at this Partnership

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On January 7, YPG issues the following press release – “Yellow Pages Group Partners With The Weather Network And MétéoMédia to Provide Local Weather on YellowPages.ca“.

Greg Sterling did a commentary on the integration on this website, titled, “Weather An Engaging Add for YPG” in which he goes on to say, “This seems like a very small thing: Yellow Pages Group Partners With The Weather Network and MeteoMedia to Provide Local Weather on YellowPages.ca . . . But it has some interesting potential to drive more frequent usage of the site.” Some interesting discussion on this post – check it out to read all the comments.

I thought I would show some integration from both a YellowPages.ca and a TheWeatherNetwork.com perspective. The deal itself is actually a two-way deal – having The Weather Network integrated on YellowPages.ca and YellowPages.ca integrated on The Weather Network.

From a YellowPages.ca Perspective:

Let’s assume that a user was conducting a Dentists in Vancouver search from the home page of YellowPages.ca.

Dentists in Vancouver on YellowPages.ca

On the following search results page, you will notice above the map – it gives you the current weather conditions within Vancouver.

Dentists in Vancouver Search Results Page with Weather on YellowPages.ca

If you want a longer term view of the weather, simply click on the “Forcast” and you will see the weather for the next 24-hours.

Dentists in Vancouver Search Results Page with Extended Forecast on YellowPages.ca

From the press release, “The addition of local weather forecasts on YellowPages.ca™ is another feature within our online environment that will help consumers make better decisions, when looking for local information,” said Nicolas Gaudreau, Vice-President, Digital Media, Yellow Pages Group. “We are thrilled to partner with The Weather Network and MétéoMédia to continue providing Canadians with useful and locally relevant information.”

From a TheWeatherNetwork.com Perspective:

TheWeatherNetwork.com itself is one of the true local players in Canada. If has every city and town in the country in which you can your weather forecast from. Under this deal, they have added YellowPages.ca to each of these local pages to make it easier for their users to get local business information.

Located just below the Weather News on each of their city pages (the following example is for Weather in Vanvouver) you will see the integrated YellowPages.ca search with some popular link categories.

Weather in Vancouver with Local Search provided by YellowPages.ca

Let’s assume that you clicked on Restaurants on The Weather Network, you would be redirected to the following page. Notice the search box, you can enter any local keyword in there for results page on the city in which you are viewing the weather in.

Restaurants in Vancouver from TheWeatherNetwork

What These Means for Local Businesses

This extends the reach for all local businesses listed on YellowPages.ca with one of Canada’s Leading Online Properties. TheWeatherNetwork.com is one of the top 25 online properties (according to ComScore MediaMetrix) in Canada and now businesses are either one click or one keyword away from potential consumers.

Tell Me What You Think

If you are interested in working with YPG Canada on these types of integrations, please feel free to connect with me. As Director of Business Development, these types of integrations are just a part of my teams deliverables. Connect with me via LinkedIn-Darby Sieben and I will respond with my work email address and next steps in the discussion.

If you have comments on this integration, please feel free to post a comment.

Interested in a Marketing Role with Canada’s Leading Online Commercial Directory; YellowPages.ca?

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Over the past two months I had have the pleasure of meeting a lot of new marketing candidates who have joined Yellow Pages Group Canada. The range of experience and quality of people is absolutely. This past week, I had the pleasure of meeting Martin Aubut who is a clear leader in social media, check out his linked profile.

Since I joined YPG in 2006 (as an employee, been working with the organization since 2001), I sometimes have to remind myself how incredibly lucky I am to be surrounded by high quality people. It is true that at the heart of any great company is people and YPG is not short of talent, which is probably one reason why YPG has been recognized as one of Canada’s Leading Employers.

Canada's Leading Employees

I am currently looking to hire 2 Senior Managers of Business Development for YellowPages.ca, Canada’s Leading Online Commercial Directory. I need one located in Montreal and one located in either Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto. If you are interested, please check out Yellow Pages Group HR Page and search for Job #1802 if interested in Montreal or #1836 if interested in Calgary/Vancouver or #1954 if interested in Toronto.

Here is a snapshot of some other interesting performance marketing roles.

The Performance Marketing Training Specialist will be part of a team of experts (Performance Marketing Delivery Team) mandated to provide dedicated support to sales representatives in achieving their targets of print and online products, with particular emphasis on Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media. Check out the YPG HR Page and if you are interested in Calgary, search for posting #1811 and if you are interested in Burnaby search for posting #1795

Check out all the positions that are currently being recruited for.

If you have any questions about working with YPG, please feel free to post a comment.