UK Car Buying Companies - Digital Marketing Benchmark Report, Q2 2025

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The Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK car buying companies has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK car buying companies perform across the digital space.

The latest Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK car buying companies has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national car buying companies, including  Big Motoring World, Cargiant, CarSupermarket.com, Motorpoint, Carcraft, cinch, Perrys Motor Sales, heycar, MOTORS, FOW, Hendy Group, and Sytner Group. 

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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 car buying companies to win brand exposure, drive online views, and ultimately yield car purchase enquiries. 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 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 Buying - COVER-Jun-18-2025-02-08-25-4566-PM

Q2 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 car buying companies on, check out our quick-look table below; Car Buying W&L June25Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK car buying companies 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 Q2 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK car buying companies was £10,059, 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 £17 . 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 Sytner Group and Cargiant reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £5, and Hendy Group has the highest at £51.

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, FOW has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £2,000, and CarSupermarket.com has the highest at £385,000.

 

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 car buying companies, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for drivers needing to enquire about buying options and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages, such as contact forms or 'request a call' options.

In our previous report, Cargiant flagged 115 404 errors. This quarter, Cargiant has reported 0 404 errors (along with heygiant), which is an impressive development in a short amount of time. It’s important that all car buying companies aim to report 0 errors (like Cargiant and heycar) to ensure they’re not directing visitors to dead ends.

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. Car buying companies need to ensure their customers have a positive experience on their site or they may just move to another company – especially if specific times have been promise, e.g. a quote in only 30 seconds.

In our previous report, Cargiant flagged the slowest mobile site speed (27). This quarter, Cargiant has made improvements, with a mobile site speed of 29. The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 53 and 22, with Hendy Group reporting the slowest speed.

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. Car buying brands should be continually pushing to improve their DA by sharing great quality content about their products and what makes/models they have in stock. 

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 this quarter ranged between 71 and 23, with Carcraft flagging the lowest DA score. This UK car buying company can increase their DA score by focusing on maintaining a strong user experience, such as reducing bounce rates and making their website easy to navigate.

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 increase in electric vehicles over the past few years, now would be a great time to push the ‘out with the old, in with the new’ narrative.

Two UK car buying companies saw a decline of organic traffic on desktop, while Carcraft reporting the biggest loss (-42%). On mobile, 3 companies saw a loss of organic traffic, with Carcraft also seeing the biggest loss for this device (-60%).

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. Car-buying brands 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', and may also be looking for information about specific models they are interested in.

MOTORS remains the brand to beat for Universal Search appearances overall (163,332) — an increase from 140,346 in the previous quarter. Carcraft was the company to watch, reporting the fewest overall appearances (463). This quarter, Carcraft remains the company to watch, and they’ve reduced their appearances to 243.

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 car buying companies could be using such as ‘car buyers near me’, 'best used vehicles near me' and ‘where to sell my car’.

MOTORS secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (34,620) and positions 4–10 (42,465). On the other hand, Carcraft reported the fewest appearances for position 3 (74), while FOW reported the fewest appearances for positions 4–10 (209).

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 car buying companies, Facebook ads are an opportunity to promote new cars to help increase sales.

We’ve included screenshots of Perry’s Motor Sales sponsored Facebook posts. This UK car buying company included vertical images, suggesting they’re catering to mobile users.

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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 buying options. 

MOTORS has the most Facebook Likes (213,600), while cinch has the most Instagram followers (32,000). It’s important that UK car buying companies also monitor their total engagement rate; MOTORS saw the highest total engagement rate of all companies (6,124).

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. All car-buying companies need to ensure their website is accessible for all customers looking to buy (or sell) vehicles.

MOTORS continues to secure the most Facebook Likes (218,900), and cinch continues to secure the most Instagram followers (33,200). MOTORS saw the highest total engagement rate in the previous quarter. However, FOW saw the highest total engagement rate this quarter (6,202).

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 Mike Movassaghi.

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