The Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK pet supplies has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK pet supply retailers perform across the digital space.
The latest Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK pet supply retailers has just been published. It covers the largest 9 pet supply retailers trading in the UK, including Pets at Home, Petplanet.co.uk, Jollyes - The Pet People, Pets & Friends, Pet Drugs Online, VioVet, Zooplus, The Pet Express, Real Pet Store, My Pet Warehouse, and petshop.co.uk.
The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other pet supply retailers to win brand exposure, drive traffic online, and even increase in-store footfall, where relevant. The report highlights quick wins that will improve enquiries from your online strategy and identifies the barriers that may be reducing your site’s ability to optimise digital performance.
To see a preview and contents page of the Q2 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
Q2 2025 winners leader board
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 11 pet supply retailers on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing pet supply retailers, or request a copy of the report for the full review.
What The Industry Research Report Covers
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site based on 50+ metrics and indicators of successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.
Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels
Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing & Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from 30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing. Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Pay-Per-Click marketing is constantly evolving, with more and more advertisers being forced to hand over a lot of control to Google's algorithms as the push for automation grows ever stronger. There are still key elements of control that we have though, the main one of these being budget which is ultimately something the algorithms can't take from you. That's why being smart with your budget and ad coverage is essential to achieving strong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.
For Q2 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK pet supply retailers was £2,814, with some of the top players in the market spending a considerable amount on areas and audiences unlikely to deliver a return. We can see this in more detail when looking at the average monthly cost per cost-per-click (CPC) amongst advertisers, with the average of this metric being £26 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively.
There are varying monthly ad budgets across the competitors in the report. While this gap highlights the competitive advantage that larger budgets can provide, it's not just about spending more; it’s about spending smarter. By focusing on driving efficiency in campaign management, targeting, and budget allocation, businesses with smaller budgets can still effectively compete with larger players. Investing in data-driven strategies and refining ad performance can help close the gap and maximise the return on every pound spent, enabling growth even in a competitive landscape. Relative to their spend, Zooplus reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £2, and Pets & Friends has the highest at £219.
The report highlights the importance of budget efficiency by comparing monthly ad spend with estimated CPC in relation to your competitors, see who has the highest and lowest CPC. To maximise the effectiveness of your budget, it’s essential to focus on driving CPC down while maintaining or improving campaign performance. In this report, My Pet Warehouse has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £99, and Zooplus has the highest at £106,000.
By optimising targeting, refining ad copy, and leveraging data to identify high-converting opportunities, you can ensure every click delivers maximum value. This approach not only stretches your budget further but also boosts your return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling you to achieve stronger results without simply increasing expenditure.
Technical Website Compliance
Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance. Brands within the pet supplies space will be juggling huge volumes of products for a wide range of different animals and breeds. They’ll want to ensure potential customers can easily find what they need and aren’t met with dead ends if looking for specialist products.
In our last audit, Pets & Friends was the retailer to watch, flagging 14,358 4xx errors. This quarter, Pets & Friends has impressively decreased their 4xx errors to 5,698. This significant reduction demonstrates that this brand has taken into account how these errors can negatively impact the web experience for users. However, they’re still reporting the most 4xx errors and should continue with the progress they’re making.
Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance
When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. For pet owners looking for food and other supplies, they’ll want to access what they’re looking for quickly, especially when items are needed urgently.
The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 63 and 14, with both Pet Drugs Online and petshop.co.uk reporting the slowest site speed. Mobile site speed is important, as a fast-loading website can decrease bounce rates and encourage visitors to make a purchase, whereas a slow-loading website can increase frustration and deter visitors from staying on site.
Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority
Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Brands in the pet supplies sector can look to collaborate with animal bloggers, and run pet breed based PR campaigns to gain exposure and backlinks.
A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it’s generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA score for this quarter ranged between 74 and 3.5, with My Pet Warehouse reporting the lowest DA. This pet supply retailer should focus on earning high-quality backlinks, which is a process that’ll take time, but will have a positive impact on their DA score. Broken link building and a digital PR strategy are two ways they can achieve this, but, most importantly, posting original, resourceful content will encourage other websites to backlink to them
Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop
A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. We’ve seen organic traffic fall for retailers across many of the sectors we specialise in, mostly in response to the cost of living crisis, as consumers cut back on essential items. For pet suppliers, they may feel this impact by pet owners opting for less specialist products, that may be available in their local supermarket for a lower cost.
Six pet supply retailers saw a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, with My Pet Warehouse flagging the biggest loss (-36%). Meanwhile, 7 retailers saw a decrease on mobile, with Pets & Friends receiving the biggest loss (-53%). These retailers should check their website is optimised for mobile. For example, text should be readable without users having to zoom in, and buttons and links should be tap-friendly. These improvements will encourage users to visit these websites from their mobile.
Universal Search Opportunity
Google Universal Search Results is an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Pet supply retailers could look to ‘reviews’ and ‘people also ask’ results, in order to build trust with potential customers and help educate them directly from the SERP.
Pets at Home secured the most Universal Search appearances (38,631), with the majority of these appearances coming from ‘reviews’ (22,000). All retailers received results for ‘reviews’, though My Pet Warehouse is missing an opportunity for ‘people also ask’.
The Longtail Keyword Opportunity
Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for brand new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Pet supply retailers can look to their range of products for inspiration and guidance on longtail keyword strategy, including key terms such as ‘next day delivery’ and product weights to appear for users showing high-purchase intent.
Pets at Home secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (14,720) — over 6 times as many as the runner up. Pets at Home also secured the most appearances for positions 4–10 (16,323) — over 3 times as many as the runner up.
Facebook Adverts
With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019. Pet supply retailers can use Facebook ads to drive awareness of low-traffic bricks and mortar locations, along with generate visibility on key product lines.
We’ve included screenshots of Pets & Friends’ sponsored Facebook posts. This pet supply retailer included branded imagery in each post, but they should consider reducing the amount of text per post to help with scannability.
Top Social Shares & Content
When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'Evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for longer. It's great for your brand engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Generating informational content will help with longtail keyword performance (and ‘people also ask’ results), and pet supply retailers can look to include shareable content such as infographics to make on-site content engaging on social media.
Pets at Home has the most Facebook Likes (531,300) and the most Instagram followers (244,800). All pet supply retailers should focus on a consistent social media strategy so that they’re regularly posting content to build a connection with their audience.
Website Readability & Accessibility
20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, brands lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Pet supply retailers should ensure their site is accessible for all as vision deficiency does not exclude pet ownership. In fact, pet supply retailers are in the unique position that at least some of their customers will be shopping for guide dogs or other assistance animals!
The Pet Express reported the most accessibility alerts (417), while Real Pet Store reported the most contrast errors (169). It’s important that these retailers works to reduce these alerts and errors to ensure they’re optimising their website for users across all devices and/or if they have a colour vision deficiency.
Get the full 70-page Q2 2025 report
To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Rory Tarplee.
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