Portland has been a keystone city in Google’s Places marketing efforts. They inundated Portland businesses and individuals with high visibility ads, marketing, schwag and high profile sponsorships.
We don’t know the number of additional claimed Places listings but we do know that it lead to a dramatic uptick in their ratings and reviews, moving them to near parity with Yelp in the important restaurant industry within several months.
It makes sense that they would leverage this visibility to introduce their new 50% Offers beta. Over the weekend we started to see general purpose Offers videos, help files and end user and business sign up forms. Now they have added end user and business sign ups to Google.com/portland, the main landing page for their Places marketing in Portland.
