OLX Indonesia’s Traction Is Not In Line with Its Brand Awareness’ Positive Trend

As we reported (and questioned) earlier, OLX self-claimed that the re-branding decision that it made doesn’t affect the platform’s brand awareness at all. It relied on the data by MetrixLab, which stated that despite the platform got re-branded, its brand awareness remains high. However, the data that we found at SimilarWeb and Alexa suggested differently. In this regard, both institutions found out that the number of visits that OLX has after the re-branding keeps decreasing significantly.

SimilarWeb claimed that, as you may see below, even though the platform enjoyed a fruitful moment from last May (right after the re-branding was completed) to June 2014, marked by the total monthly visitor it had which reached 17.700.000 visits, the number tended to be falling so fast that in September the same year, the number of visits was ‘only’ 13.000.000.

FYI, brand awareness and traffic are two sides of coin that can’t be separated between each other. Thus, when we reported that in September OLX claimed that its brand awareness was as good as 48%, the number was actually lower than when the platform was still after the name of Tokobagus, as it reached 56% in March.

In line with SimilarWeb, Alexa also noted a quite similar trend. While OLX was ranked 832th in August, which was the highest ranking OLX has ever got, its ranking free-fell to 944th in October. If it’s not surprising enough for you, let us tell you that in the same time frame, one of OLX’s main competitors, Berniaga, also had just the same negative trend, as we can see in SimilarWeb’s graph below.

Given this fact, we conclude that the increase of brand awareness isn’t always in line with the increase of traffic that a website possesses. While the reasons of such negative trend remain unknown, we suggest that it’s not only internal factors, such as Tokobagus’ re-branding, that contribute to the trend, but also external factors as well, e.g the stronger influence that e-commerce and marketplace have towards Indonesian digital industry.

[Illustration: Shutterstock | Diagram: SimilarWeb, Alexa]