The Q3 2025 benchmarking report for UK beauty and cosmetics retailers has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK beauty and cosmetics retailers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2025 benchmarking report for UK beauty and cosmetics retailers has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK beauty and cosmetics retailers, including Cult Beauty, BEAUTY BAY, LOOKFANTASTIC.COM, Illamasqua, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty, Mallows Beauty, Barry M Cosmetics, P LOUISE MAKEUP ACADEMY LTD, Clomaná, Sephora, Beauty Pie, and Space NK.

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 beauty and cosmetics retailers to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and generate holiday bookings. The report highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons across 20+ online performance metrics and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for beauty and cosmetics retailers to win brand exposure, online growth and sales.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q3 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q3 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 UK beauty and cosmetics retailers, check out our quick-look table below:

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK beauty and cosmetics retailers 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 Q3 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK beauty & cosmetics retailers was £2,418, 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 £7 . 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, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty, BEAUTY BAY, and Space NK reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £0, and Beauty Pie has the highest at £50.

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, BEAUTY BAY has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £268, and LOOKFANTASTIC.COM has the highest at £142,000.

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. Beauty and cosmetics retailers will want to ensure that key information for products is stated clearly and that its linking structure is accurate and works accordingly.

In our previous audit, Illamasqua reported 57 404 errors. This quarter, Illamasqua continues to report 57 404 errors, which could suggest they’re not regularly monitoring their website for these errors. However, this quarter, Beauty Pie is the retailer to watch, reporting 426 404 errors. A quick way for a website to reduce 404 errors is by setting up proper 301 redirects from broken or outdated URLs to relevant live pages. Regularly monitoring with tools like Google Search Console also helps catch and fix errors quickly.

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. To create a positive website experience, all brands should optimise their website so that each page takes no longer than 3 seconds to load. A fast-loading website is ideal for consumers existing in a fast-paced market where they can resort to competitors in a second.

In our previous report, Sephora flagged the slowest mobile site speed (20). This quarter, Sephora continues to report 20 for their mobile site speed. However, Clomaná is the retailer to watch this quarter, with a mobile site speed of 9. A website might see reduced mobile site speed due to unoptimised images, heavy scripts, or excessive use of third-party plugins that slow down loading. Poor server response times or a lack of caching can also create delays. Additionally, mobile networks are often slower or less stable than desktop connections, amplifying performance issues.

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. The key for beauty and cosmetics retailers to improve their DA rating, is to ensure they’re nailing the basics: delivering quality content that other websites will want to link to. Content should be unique, relevant, and current for other websites with a similar target audience to watch to backlink 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. In our last report, Clomaná reported the lowest DA (7). This quarter, Clomaná remains the retailer with the lowest DA, though they’ve since increased this to 13. They can focus on acquiring backlinks to help increase their DA. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to backlinks, as links from authoritative, relevant sites carry more weight with search engines. A few high-quality backlinks can boost rankings more effectively than many low-quality ones. Too many poor backlinks can even harm a site’s SEO by signalling spammy practices.

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. As consumers are cutting back on treats and expendable items due to the cost of living crisis, it's to be expected that we’ll see a decline in organic traffic year on year. However, not everyone is cutting back on luxuries like beauty and cosmetic products, so brands should adhere to a keyword strategy, where they track its performance regularly.

Five retailers saw a drop in organic traffic on desktop, and five retailers saw a drop on mobile. For both devices, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty saw the biggest decrease (-46% on desktop, and -41% on 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. 'Reviews' and 'images' results are all ways for holiday parks to gain trust, and share eye-catching content about their locations, directly from the SERP.

LOOKFANTASTIC.COM remains at the top of the leaderboard for the most Universal Search appearances (36,799), with Sephora close behind (33,967). ‘Images’ received the most overall appearances for all retailers.

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. Beauty and cosmetics retailers should focus on longtail keywords, such as ‘body oils and shimmers’, to help outperform competitors. Most importantly, retailers should track the performance of its keyword strategy and make adjustments accordingly.

Sephora secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (5,542), and LOOKFANTASTIC.COM secured the most appearances for positions 4–10 (23,781). Websites should naturally integrate longtail keywords into blog posts, product pages, and FAQs to match specific user search intent. They should focus on creating valuable, in-depth content that answers niche queries while keeping readability smooth and authentic. Using these keywords in titles, headings, and meta descriptions also helps boost visibility in search results.

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. Facebook ads are a great way for blinds and shutters brands to reach people who are specifically looking to make improvements to their homes.

We’ve included screenshots of Cult Beauty’s sponsored Facebook posts. This UK beauty & cosmetics retailer utilised vertical media to optimise their content to mobile users 

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. Beauty and cosmetics retailers should upload social media content that benefits its audience and isn’t just related to its products.

BEAUTY BAY secured the most Facebook Likes (1.5m), and Charlotte Tilbury Beauty landed the most Instagram followers (7.3m). Pinterest was the most popular social media platforms of all brands. Charlotte Tilbury Beauty received the highest total engagement rate (103,554) and the highest average engagement (395).

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 as they turn elsewhere. Beauty and cosmetics retailers should focus on delivering a website that’s accessible for all, taking into account devices their target audience uses as well as any personal deficiencies its consumers may have.

In our last report, Space NK reported the most accessibility alerts (250). This quarter, Space NK remains the retailer to watch, though they’ve slightly reduced these alerts to 242. Mallows Beauty is the one to watch for contrast errors (28), with both Illamasqua (24) and Clomaná (23) close behind. Websites should treat accessibility alerts as signals that parts of their site may be difficult for users with disabilities to navigate. Addressing issues like poor colour contrast, missing alt text, or improper heading structures ensures inclusivity and compliance with standards. Fixing these alerts not only improves user experience but can also benefit SEO and brand reputation. 

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q3 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.