Sector Insights | ClickThrough Marketing

UK Automotive Dealerships 2 - Digital Marketing Benchmark Report, Q2 2025

Written by Rory Tarplee | 01-Jul-2025 14:45:05

The Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK car dealers has just been published. Learn how these leading 12 UK dealerships perform across the digital space.

The latest Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK car dealers has just been published. It covers 12 of the largest UK car dealers, including The RRG Group, Porsche Retail Group, John Clark Motor Group, Drive Motor Retail, Steven Eagell Group, Perrys Motor Sales, Hendy Group, Citygate Automotive, Cambria Automobiles, Sinclair Group, Barretts Kent, and Hartwell Automotive Group.Car Dealers 2 - LOGOS

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 dealerships to increase market share, generate leads and sales, and increase brand exposure. The report highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons across 20+ online performance metrics for the dealerships included.

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. Car Dealers 2 - COVER

Q2 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these 12 leading dealerships on, check out our quick-look table below; Car Dealers 2 W&L June25

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing automotive dealerships, 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 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 automotive dealerships (list 2) was £1,552, 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 £52 . 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 Hartwell Automotive Group and Sinclair Group reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £0, and Drive Motor Retail has the highest at £263.

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, Steven Eagell Group has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £25, and Porsche Retail Group has the highest at £82,000.

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 UK car dealers, their website is one of the most important components of their business. It is therefore vital for their site to be running smoothly to ensure their customers can easily navigate across key pages.

In our previous audit, Drive Motor Retail reported 504 404 errors. This quarter, Drive Motor Retail has dramatically decreased these 404 errors to 39. By reducing these errors, this automotive dealership has helped search engines crawl their website, enabling them to display in search engines for users to discover. 

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 UK car dealers, their customers need to have full and absolute trust in their brand. A slow, lagging mobile site will not ensure the customer has trust and may lead them to try other businesses instead.

In the previous report, Drive Motor Retail had the slowest mobile site speed (16). This quarter, Drive Motor Retail has decreased their mobile site speed to 8, continuing to make them the dealership to watch. A slow-loading mobile site can deter users from re-visiting the site and may result in more bounce rates.

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 is not gained through sponsored ads. UK car dealers should be continually pushing to improve their DA and should focus on creating shareable content that high-authoritative websites will want to share with their audience. 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 this quarter ranged between 87 and 7, with only Porsche Retail Group sitting in the ‘excellent’ zone. All automotive dealerships in the ‘average’ zone and below should start by fixing technical errors and any 404s on their website to help improve their DA score.

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 a variety of UK car dealers for consumers to choose from, we would expect all the companies to be seeing increases in their mobile and desktop traffic.

All automotive dealerships secured an increase of organic traffic on desktop, with Sinclair Group seeing the biggest increase (+802%). All dealerships also reported an increase on mobile, with Sinclair Group also seeing the biggest increase (+725%).

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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. UK car dealers should be utilising ‘images’ and ‘reviews’ so prospective customers can read past customers’ experiences and see visuals for cars they want to purchase. 

John Clark Motor Group continued to land the most Universal Search appearances (11,157) — an increase from 10,594 in the previous quarter. ‘Images’ received the highest results for all automotive dealerships, which demonstrates that brands are using text attributes for images.

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. There are many longtail keyword options that UK car dealers could use, such as ‘cars for sale’ and ‘vehicles available to hire’.

Perrys Motor Sales secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (834), and Steven Eagell Group secured the most appearances for positions 4–10 (2,096). Longtail keywords are more advantageous than shorttail keywords as they’re less competitive since fewer websites will target longtail keywords, making it easier to rank higher 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. Social media is a great way for UK car dealers to expand their audience and provide updates about new launches to prospective consumers.

We’ve included screenshots of Perrys Motor Sales’ sponsored Facebook posts. This UK automotive dealership included a variety of imagery, which is a great way to provide an online audience with diverse material, rather than the same imagery, which can make social media users more likely to continuing scrolling without engaging.

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. As with building content for digital PR strategies, UK car dealers can look to create highly engaging, shareable content to expand their audience reach.

Perrys Motor Sales Ltd has the most Facebook Likes (68,100), while Porsche AG has the most Instagram followers (21,000). Brands should think of social media as a platform to connect with their target audience and current customers and not just an opportunity to sell their products.

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. UK car dealers need to ensure that their websites are accessible to everyone.

Perrys Motor Sales has the most Facebook Likes (68,000), and both Hendy Group and Steven Eagell Group have the most Instagram followers (3,900). Social media is a great way for dealerships to communicate directly with their audience, and it shouldn’t just be seen as a platform to advertise their services, as this can come across as too pushy.

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.