LivingSocial to “overtake” Groupon this year

LivingSocial will use a raft of product and service innovations as it looks to overtake market leader Groupon in the UK by the end of the year.

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The group buying site says it has seen a “good trajectory” of growth in the UK since its launch here last June and expects its upcoming advertising campaign to attract more users to the site and make it the market leader in terms of users.

The campaign, which is set to launch in July, will include “more traditional forms of advertising” although further details have yet to be announced. LivingSocial currently focuses most of its marketing spend on digital display and search campaigns.

LivingSocial’s UK site will also behas been updated to include family deals and is soon to launch “instant deals”, a service that will bring offers to users in realtime on their mobiles.

The UK site is also set to extend its hyperlocal offering, by including more towns and smaller areas in cities in location-based targeted deals. LivingSocial in London currently features six separate markets.

LivingSocial UK, Ireland and Netherlands managing director Peter Briffett says: “Hyperlocal is our key driver, we’re the only company offering that – it’s the future of local advertising. We give businesses real ROI and a powerful model to promote themselves.”

LivingSocial currently attracts about half as many monthly unique visitors as Groupon, according to comScore.

Briffett says the launch of similar deals and offers services by bigger internet players such as Google and Facebook is not a threat but instead shows “the big appetite there is for deals”.

Groupon’s UK managing director Christopher Muhr also denied that services such as Google Offers would dent its position as the market leading daily deals service.

Top 5 coupon sites
Source: comScore April 2011

  Site Total monthly unique visitors
1 Groupon 2.39 million
2 Vouchercodes.co.uk 2.03 million
3 MyVoucherCodes.co.uk 1.30 million
4 LivingSocial 1.08 million
5 HotUKDeals.com 1.03 million