The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK animal attractions has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK animal attractions perform across the digital space.

The brand new Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK animal attractions has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK animal attractions, including Chester Zoo, London Zoo, The Aspinall Foundation, Edinburgh Zoo, Whipsnade Zoo, West Midland Safari Park, Longleat, Colchester Zoo, Yorkshire Wildlife Park, Dudley Zoo, Birdworld, and Paignton Zoo Environmental Park.

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 animal attractions to win brand exposure, sell online tickets, and even improve digital footfall. 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 take-aways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q4 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 animal attractions on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK animal attractions 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 under-perform. 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 animal attractions was £2,864, 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 £29 . 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, London Zoo has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £3, and Chester Zoo has the highest at £262.

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, Dudley Zoo has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £15, and Chester Zoo has the highest at £122,000.

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 animal attractions, they’ll want to ensure their checkout process is simple and that they regularly assess their internal linking structure to ensure they’re directing consumers to links that are working.

Dudley Zoo flagged 227 4xx errors — the highest of all UK animal attractions. 404 errors can hurt the user experience and lead to users distrusting a brand, as visitors can become frustrated when they land on a ‘page not found’ page.

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. When you're competing to sell tickets to events, such as an animal attraction park, an unappealing site (or one that doesn't signpost well to tickets) can mean users turn to your competitors instead. Animal attractions should ensure that their websites load quickly — ideally, no longer than 3 seconds. Otherwise, there’s a risk that consumers should grow impatient and leave the website.

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 61 and 2, with Longleat flagging the lowest site speed and Yorkshire Wildlife Park reporting the fastest mobile speed. Page load speed matters because it affects how quickly a user can navigate through your website. A slow-loading website will create delays, so a user can’t reach their destination with ease.

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 gage of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Animal attractions can look to collaborate with high-authoritative websites, along with any publications within their niche, to gain high-authority backlinks that will improve their DA. Animal attractions should focus on increase backlinks, and uploading content that’s unique, informative, and selfless will encourage other websites with a similar target audience to link back to. A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60.

The DA score ranged between 73 and 46, with Birdworld reporting the lowest DA score. The best way to acquire backlinks from high-authoritative websites is to give those websites a reason to direct their audience to you. Uploading original, quality content is the key to achieving this.

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. Due to the cost-of-living crisis, we're seeing that many potential customers across a number of sectors are either cutting back on expendable items, or opting for cheaper alternatives. Animal attractions may feel the impact of this, though they can continue to follow a keyword strategy to improve the results for this category.

West Midland Safari Park saw a decrease in organic traffic on desktop (-55%), while 8 animal attractions Fly Park reported a decrease on mobile. Brands can improve their click-through rates by improving their titles to encourage visitors to visit their website. Using time-sensitive, emotional headlines can encourage users to visit their website.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results  is an evolving opportunity to make your pages more visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, 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 brand can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. For animal attractions, they'll want to ensure they're appearing for 'Local Pack' results, ensuring they are prominent when potential customers are looking for a nearby visit.

London Zoo continues to secure the most overall Universal Search appearances (7,819), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’ (5,900). On the other hand, Birdworld reported the fewest overall Universal Search appearances (345). This UK animal attraction should consider using phrases from ‘people also ask’ throughout their website, particularly in blogs to help increase their overall results.

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. For animal attractions, long-tail keywords could be focused on specific offerings that potential customers are looking for, such as ‘London conservation zoo’.

London Zoo continues to secure the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (1,210) and positions 4–10 (1,781). Chester Zoo is at a close second place with 1,122 for position 3 and 1,688 for positions 4–10.

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. Animal attractions can adopt a social media strategy to expand reach to help increase ticket sales.

We’ve included examples of Chester Zoo’s sponsored posts. This UK animal attraction should ensure they’re using line breaks to capture social media users’ attention while they’re scrolling their feed.

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. Content creation also helps with DA, appearances for longtail keywords and 'people also ask' results, so animal attractions look to creating shareable pieces that can support performance in all of these areas. 

Chester Zoo has the most Facebook Likes (1.2 million) and the most Instagram followers (366,700). Social media is a great way for brands to share their latest releases, but they shouldn’t just think of social media as a sales funnel but as a way to update their customers and connect with them.

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. Sites such as animal attractions often focus on their need to appear visually appealing and can therefore fall short of the accessibility requirements their users with visual challenges will need. For consumers using a screen reader, all brands should look to eradicate any accessibility alerts and contrast errors.

In our previous report, West Midlands Safari Park reported 193 accessibility alerts. This quarter, has increased their accessibility alerts to 261. Good accessibility equates to good SEO, and brands should ensure they’re limiting both accessibility alerts and contrast errors across their website by checking for broken links, low-contrast text and more.

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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