Street Fight Daily: Google Close to Acquiring Waze, Why Yahoo Should Buy Foursquare

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Google Is Close to Acquiring Waze, a Rival in Maps (New York Times)
Google, which dominates the market for online maps, is close to a deal to acquire Waze, a largely Israeli company that has developed a social mapping service that is popular with drivers seeking to find the best route given actual traffic conditions. The proposed acquisition, for a price of more than $1 billion, could be announced early this week, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal was not final.

The Uber-ization of Local Commerce (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: Last week, ReachLocal took its new commerce platform for home services, ClubLocal, off its training wheels, expanding the program into the Bay Area. Pitched as an Uber for home services, it aims to create a similar self-service platform for home repairs and plumbers, but its execution overlooks some of the dynamics that make some industries, like Taxi’s, more susceptible to the model than others.

Checklist: All the Reasons Yahoo Is Going to Acquire Foursquare (Quartz)
If a deal is ever announced, we’re unlikely to know Mayer’s logic until 20 years hence, when her autobiography is climbing the charts of Google-Glass-based books. But say you could be a fly on the wall of Yahoo’s boardroom. Here’s what Mayer’s personal checklist for whether or not to acquire a company might look like.

5 Strategies for Tracking the Success of a Hyperlocal Marketing Program (Street Fight)
What merchants really need is a clear-cut way to compare the effectiveness of their hyperlocal marketing initiatives, so they focus their energies on the platforms that work. To answer that question, we consulted with experts from inside the industry. Here are five strategies that merchants can use to track the success of their digital marketing initiatives.

Call It Groupon 3.0: Deals giant on a Mobile Mission (Crain’s Chicago Business)
In the 18 months since it went public, Groupon has morphed beyond its roots of emailing local deals on food and manicures to offering discounts on merchandise from mattresses to watches. Groupon says nearly half the sales in its core North American business are done on mobile devices, and it could be the first big e-commerce player to get the majority of its revenue from mobile.

Sponsored Content: 3 Ways Local Search Is Helping Preserve Your Brand’s Image (Street Fight)
In the increasingly mobile and locally-driven digital world in which we find ourselves, it is an absolute necessity to ensure the visibility and accuracy of your brand’s online identity while constantly working to build and preserve a socially-integrated and supported reputation. At the core of it all is the consumer’s mobile and local search behavior.

Retailers’ Digital Ad Spending Nears $10 Billion (Mashable)
U.S. retailers, already the heaviest spenders in digital advertising by category, are forecast to increase their spending by another 14% to $9.4 billion this year. By next year, that figure will surpass $10.4 billion, reaching $13.3 billion by 2017.

What Mobile Marketers Need To Know About Online-Offline Attribution (MarketingLand)
Bill Dinan: Most marketers today are making valiant efforts to track all secondary actions – from phone calls and driving directions to map and reservations look ups – but tracking a call back to the specific mobile search campaign that drove it is not as simple when working with a high volume of campaigns. As a result, dynamic number insertion is one of the key online-offline attribution tools mobile marketers should have in their toolkit.

Making of a Hyperlocal: Measuring Your Audience – Analytics (Talk About Local)
Sarah Hartley: While I come from a mainstream publishing background where the stats are vitally important in assessing the success and viability of any online initiative, it’s interesting to consider how valuable it is to apply those measures to a community site or neighbourhood blog. Many community publishers operate on the basis of serving a ‘self-fulfilling audience’ i.e. it will grow to a size that is of interest to those who find it useful/existing/interesting etc.

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