Exclusive Data: Groupon Unscathed By Super Bowl Fallout

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Traffic data from Hitwise suggests Groupon's much-maligned Super Bowl ads have failed to hurt or help the group-buying platform in its battle with LivingSocial. The San Francisco-based research firm gave ClickZ an exclusive look at last week's traffic numbers for the group-buying niche's top players.

As the chart below indicates, Groupon had been hemorrhaging traffic to LivingSocial for weeks leading up to the days before the Super Bowl. The Chicago-based group-buying platform lost nearly 23 percentage points of market share, while LivingSocial gained 14. Part of each brand's respective skid and rise had to do with LivingSocial's mid-January $20-for-$10 Amazon deal, which sold 1,301,296 vouchers.

But for the week ending Feb. 5, Groupon grabbed back 7 percentage points from LivingSocial. And while last week Groupon (7.7 million unique visitors) dipped by 1.5 percentage points as people complained about its TV spots, its Washington, DC-based competitor (1.9 million) experienced a similar slip.

So it appears Groupon was not knocked off its axis after airing its offending spots. A record-breaking audience of 111 million Super Bowl viewers watched the commercials, including one that began by spotlighting the troubles of people in Tibet before taking a crass turn half-way through. The public brouhaha about those ads led CEO Andrew Mason to author two blogs last week, with the last entry announcing the TV spots had been shelved.

Meanwhile, Hitwise's data reveals that KGB Deals has increased its market share by nearly 7X in less than two months. DealFind and the White Pages' DealPop platform are also making progress in the burgeoning daily deals space.