OLX Indonesia's Traffic Is Not In Harmony With Increasing Brand Awareness

Claims about awareness society against OLX Indonesia that we tell some time ago, it may have succeeded in giving the notion that the decision rebranding what he did did not really affect the overall performance of the startup that was formerly known as Tokobagus. We are trying to do our own assessment, whether after change name last May performance traffic OLX Indonesia is not affected by the problem rebranding. 

OLX Indonesia claims, based on calculations by the analysis agency MetrixLab, rebranding Tokobagus to be OLX Indonesia doesn't affect brand awareness which is common with sites or products that do this. A few months after rebranding, OLX Indonesia was declared successful in returning to its initial status andtop of mind awareness' than other competitors.

Based on our brief search on the platform analytics popular SimilarWeb and Alexa, top of mind awareness that echoed by OLX Indonesia, it turns out that it is not in line with the performance of site traffic, in fact it tends to show a drastic decline.

As you can see below, the SimilarWeb platform shows that, although it had shot up starting in mid-May 2014 (coinciding with the moment of the name change) until it reached its peak in June by reaching the number of monthly visitors reached 17.700.000, the graph says otherwise, the number of visits by OLX Indonesia continued to decline until last September it landed at 13.000.000 visits.

It should be noted, although different forms, brand awareness and traffic calculations into a single unit that supports each other, in our report some time ago, OLX Indonesia did claim in September, brand awareness they showed a fairly good increase of 48% even though it had not reached as much as when it was still carrying the name Tokobagus which was claimed to have reached 56% in March. This difference eventually resulted in a decrease in OLX Indonesia's traffic performance.

Same is the case with the platform indicated by Alexa, based on scale calculations global ranking OLX Indonesia has achieved a fairly optimistic upward trend in the same period, although it has experienced the same decline until now. It can be seen, that OLX Indonesia had the highest ranking in August which reached 832. Unfortunately, in the following months that number continued to decline and until the close of October, OLX Indonesia was ranked at 944.

In short, our research led to the conclusion that, brand awareness which continues to increase is not always in line with the traffic obtained by a site. For OLX, this kind of downward trend should be a concern for him to put more aggressive strategies and efforts so that this decline does not continue to be more drastic in the future. However, our subsequent study also found a quite unique fact that its competitor, Berniaga, was also experiencing the same downward trend.

As can be seen in the SimilarWeb graph above, in the same month, the summary of Berniaga's traffic fell on a scale that is almost similar to that of OLX Indonesia. It is not yet clear what issues have caused this downward trend, apart from internal factors such as for example from rebranding Tokobagus, we estimate that there are also many external factors, such as stretching marketplace and retail e-commerce which is also starting to get stronger in Indonesia's digital industry.

[photo illustration: Shutterstock | Chart: SimilarWeb, Alexa]