UPDATE: Lasoo, the Salmat-owned retail comparison site, has hit out at claims that its audience numbers are plummeting and says in fact its audience numbers are growing.
Lasoo told AdNews this afternoon that it removed its tracking tags from Nielsen in February due to "latency issues - so
those statistics are no longer accurate". According to Lasoo, in the month of February this year it received 1,206,633 daily unique visitors, up from February 2010 when it had 914,260 daily unqiue visitors. Lasoo says its peak was in the December 2010 Christmas period where the audience was 2,056,779.
Earlier today, AdNews reported that Lasoo had appointed
Mitchell & Partners as media agency on its $7 million advertising
account, to reverse its plummeting audience numbers (see below).
Lasoo.com.au has the third highest audience share in the shopping
directories and guides category behind the GetPrice network and the
Shopping.com network, and had a unique audience of 846,000 in February,
representing 18.6% audience share, according to Nielsen.
This
marks the lowest audience numbers for the site in a year, and is lower
than the Feburary 2010 figures of 950,000, according to Nielsen data.
Nielsen figures show that during the December 2010 Christmas period, the
site's audience levels reached a yearly peak of about 1.5 million.
The appointment of Aegis-owned Mitchells follows a protracted pitch process, which kicked off in November last year, in tandem with a creative pitch. The creative account was awarded to BMF.
Mitchells and BMF have been tasked with generating a brand campaign and increasing marketing activity for Lasoo. The brand has not dealt extensively with agencies since its 2007 launch, when it worked with creative agency Twenty20 and media agency OMD.
Lasoo is conducting an internal recruitment drive for a marketing head, as a result of its planned increase in marketing. Salmat digital general manager of product and marketing, Matthew Mason, previously oversaw the role but the marketing function has since been removed from his job title.
Marketing consultant Matt McGrath, former Y&R Brands executive chairman, denies he is the new marketing head though he is currently overseeing marketing for Lasoo.
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