The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK airport parking has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK airport parking companies perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK airport parking has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national airport parking providers, including Airport Parking & Hotels, Purple Parking, Sky Park, BCP, NCP, Parking4Less, Airparks, Holiday Extras, Jet Parks, Fly Park, and Maple Parking.
 

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 airport parking brands to win brand exposure, drive online views, and generate bookings. 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 Q1 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 11 airport parking providers on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK airport parking brands or request a copy of the report for the full review.

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What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer 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 Q1 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK airport parking companies was £10,819, 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 £40 . 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, both Sky Park and Airport Parking & Hotels have the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £3, and Maple Parking has the highest at £407.

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, Maple Parking has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £407, and Holiday Extras has the highest at £298,000.

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. For airport parking brands, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for drivers needing to enquire about parking options and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages, such as locations and prices.

NCP reported 100 4xx errors — the highest of all UK airport parking companies. There are some ways websites can reduce 404 errors, helping to improve the user experience. The most productive way is to check and fix broken links regularly. Setting up 301 redirect links for moved or deleted pages is also a great way to prevent visitors from being sent to a dead end.

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. Airport parking providers especially need to ensure their mobile site is perfect, as customers may need to access their information from the airport on their mobile devices.

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 63 and 23, with Airport Parking & Hotels flagging the lowest site speed and Sky Park reporting the fastest mobile speed. Faster checkout pages can lead to more conversions, so all brands should take website speed into consideration to help with sales.

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. Airport parking companies should be continually pushing to improve their DA by sharing great-quality content about their locations and parking options.

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 ranged between 77 and 25, with Maple Parking reporting the lowest DA score. The best thing a brand can do to increase their DA score is creating original content. This will make it more likely that an authoritative website will want to provide backlinks to their website.

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. With the cost-of-living crisis, it’s to be expected that brands will see a decrease in organic traffic due to consumers limiting the amount of money they spend on non-essential items like flights.

Three of the companies saw a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, while only Fly Park reported a decrease on mobile (-55%). Fly Park also reported the biggest decrease on desktop (-50%). Brands should use social media marketing to increase visits to their website and encourage backlinks to their website.

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. Airport parking providers should be utilising all universal search features as potential customers will be interested to see how previous customers have found their experience via 'reviews', 'FAQs', and 'people also ask'.

Holiday Extras continues to secure the most overall Universal Search appearances (54,072), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’ (21,100). Other airport parking companies can increase their appearances for ‘images’ by ensuring they’re including alt information for all images to incorporate keywords.

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 retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index. There are many longtail keyword options airport parking companies could be using such as ‘parking near Heathrow’ and ‘best airport parking options’.

Holiday Extras continues to secure the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (8,780) and positions 4–10 (21,309). Parking4Less has secured plentiful of appearances for positions 4–10 (1,584), which is a great way for a brand to increase their position in search engines.

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. For UK airport parking, Facebook ads are an opportunity to ensure customers see parking availability, prices, and location options.

We’ve included examples of Maple Parking’s sponsored posts. This UK airport parking should ensure they’re using line breaks to encourage social media users to stop and read their content.

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 retailer engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Social Media could be especially useful for sharing information about their different locations and any offers they are running.

Holiday Extras has the most Facebook Likes (263,200) and the most Instagram followers (16,700). Engagement rate is more important than social media followers, as this metric demonstrates whether users are interacting with a website’s content.

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, retailers lose customer interest and they turn elsewhere. All airport parking brands need to ensure their website is accessible for all potential customers.

In our previous audit, Purple Parking reported 347 accessibility alerts. This quarter, Purple Parking’s accessibility alerts remain at 347, and they should address these alerts to improve readability and usability of their website for all audiences.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 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 Mike Movassaghi.

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