The Q1 2026 benchmarking report for UK bike brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK bike brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q1 2026 benchmarking report for UK bike brands has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK bike brands, including Planet X Bikes, Ribble Cycles, Raleigh UK, Brompton Bicycle, ORANGE BIKES, Boardman Bikes, Condor Cycles, Orro Bikes, Fairlight Cycles, Whyte Bikes, Genesis Bikes, and Pashley Cycles.
The research gives bike brands an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online and quantifies the gaps, risks, and missed opportunities for other bike brands to win brand exposure, drive online views, and increase recognition and purchases. 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.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 bike brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK bike brands or request a copy of the report for the full review.
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.
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 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 trong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.
For Q1 2026, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK bike brands was £2,528 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 £430. 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, Raleigh UK reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £13,and Planet X Bikes has the highest at £4,889.
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, Condor Cycles has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £3,220, and Planet XBikes has the highest at £132,000.
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.
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. UK bike brands should aim to limit the number of errors on their website, such as 4xx errors. One way they can do this is by regularly assessing their linking structure and ensuring that they’re not sending consumers to broken links that will lead them to a dead end.
In our previous audit, ORANGE BIKES received the most 404 errors (349).This quarter, ORANGE BIKES has dramatically reduced their 404 errors to 11,moving them up the leaderboard. Currently, the bike brand with the most 404errors is Condor Cycles, flagging a total of 190. Managing content updates carefully reduces the likelihood of deleted pages causing 404 errors. Before removing any page, websites should assess whether it still receives traffic or backlinks and either update the content or redirect the URL to a relevant alternative rather than deleting it outright.
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. All websites should take steps to limit their download speeds — aiming for no longer than 3 seconds. Thankfully, brands can make improvements to site speed quickly, so we can expect to see a lot of movement for this category.
The mobile site speed ranges between 96 and 54, with ORANGE BIKES continue to report the fastest mobile site speed — a decrease from 64 in our previous audit. A fast-loading mobile site is not just a technical improvement — it’s a strategic advantage that directly impacts success across every digital channel.
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 bike brands should focus on creating content that other websites will want to direct their audience to, which means ensuring that the topics are relevant, accurate, and unique.
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, Fairlight Cycles reported the lowest DA score (33). This quarter, Fairlight Cycles continues to report the lowest DA score (33). Higher domain authority improves cross-channel performance beyond search engines. Strong organic visibility supports social media engagement, content distribution, and brand recognition across platforms. When users already recognise a domain, they are more likely to engage with it across multiple digital channels.
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. UK bike brands have an opportunity to gain organic traffic by using an effective keyword strategy — particularly incorporating longtail keywords. They can also follow other methods, such as including links to their website in email newsletters on directing social media followers to visit their website.
Six brands reported a drop in organic traffic on desktop, with both Orro Bikes and Condor Cycles reporting the biggest loss (-21%). On mobile, two brands reported a drop in organic traffic, with Condor Cycles reporting the biggest drop (-30%). Monitoring organic traffic separately on desktop and mobile allows brands to build more accurate, data-driven strategies. Understanding why traffic volumes differ across devices helps brands improve performance, target the right optimisations, and create balanced growth across all platforms rather than relying on a single-device perspective.
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, and a site can appear for Universal Search results without being strong in standard rankings. UK bike brands will want to ensure they have a strong performance for 'reviews' and ‘images’ to help increase their online rankings.
Ribble Cycles has secured the most Universal Search appearances (2,333) — previously in fourth place. The majority of their appearances came from ‘images’ (1,700).
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. UK bike brands can optimise towards high purchase-intent phrases, such as ‘commuter eBike' or ‘carbon road bike.’
RibbleCycles has since secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (538).Raleigh UK also secured the most appearances for positions 4–10 (1,634) — an increase from 1,545 previously. Longtail keywords create a more resilient SEO strategy. Instead of depending on a small number of high-risk keywords, websites build diversified traffic sources. This reduces vulnerability to ranking changes and supports consistent, long-term organic growth.
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.
We’ve included screenshots of Brompton Bicycle’s sponsored Facebook posts. Asking simple, low-effort questions encourages interaction. Easy responses like polls, emojis, or one-word answers lower the barrier to engagement.
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. UK bike brands can create shareable social content that isn’t just focused on the brand to build a relationship with its online community.
Ribble Cycles secured the most Facebook Likes (141,300), and Brompton Bicycle secured the most Instagram followers (183,800). Facebook was the most popular social media platforms of all brands. Brompton Bicycle received the highest total engagement rate (13,320), and ORANGE BIKES received the highest average engagement (184).
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. Brands should focus on reducing accessibility alerts, errors, and contrast errors to improve readability for those using a screen reader.
In our previous report, Fairlight Cycles flagged the most accessibility alerts (71).This quarter, Fairlight Cycles has increased their total of accessibility alerts to 75. However, the brand with the most accessibility alerts currently is Whyte Bikes — a total of 117. Proactively managing media content supports accessibility compliance. Adding alt text to images, captions to videos, and transcripts to audio content prevents common accessibility alerts and improves inclusivity.
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.