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

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK craft brewers has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK craft brewers, including BrewDog, Beavertown Brewery, Siren Craft Brew, Magic Rock Brewing Co., The Wild Beer Co, Cloudwater Brew Co., Ltd, Verdant Brewing Co., Pressure Drop Brewing, Duration Brewing, Burnt Mill Brewery, Unity Brewing Co., and Mondo Brewing Company.

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 beer sellers to win brand exposure, drive traffic online, and even increase in-store footfall, where relevant. 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.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

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

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK live-in care providers 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 Q1 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK craft brewers was £26, 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 £9 . 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, Beavertown Brewery has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £4, and BrewDog has the highest at £105.

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, Beavertown Brewery has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £1,060, and BrewDog has the lowest at £1,050.

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. Brands within the brewing space will be juggling huge volumes of products for a wide range of flavours and alcohol variations. They’ll want to ensure potential customers can easily find what they need and aren’t met with dead ends if looking for specialist products. They'll particularly want to take care over key pages such as offers, new product launches, stock updates, and ensure that prospective customers can easily find key information.

Magic Rock Brewing Co., 134 4xx errors — the highest of all UK craft brewers, and Unity Brewing Co., didn’t score any 4xx errors, which is something all brewers should aim for.

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. Brewing brands will want to ensure they have a fast-performing site that gives off an exceptional first impression to potential customers looking to buy from them or research more about their offerings.

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 69 and 19, with Duration Brewing flagging the lowest site speed and Mondo Brewing Company reporting the fastest mobile speed. If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, this can potentially lead to frustrating users and cause them to leave a website.

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. For brands operating in the food and drink industry, they should be working with digital PR specialists to identify opportunities and ideas for out-of-the-box, surprising PR campaigns.

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 78 and 22, with Unity Brewing Co., flagging the lowest DA score. The most important factor to keep in mind when a brand wants to increase their domain authority score is ensuring they’re uploading quality content.

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. The cost of living crisis and a drop in consumer confidence is having a wide impact across all non-essential sectors, as customers are cutting back on treats and expendable items. In the case of the food and drink industry, this could mean that customers are sticking to basics, rather than investing in alcohol, too.

Two of the craft brewers saw a decline in organic traffic on desktop, while 8 reported a decrease on mobile. With this data in mind, UK craft brewers should ensure their website is easy and enjoyable to navigate for mobile users.

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 brand can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Beer sellers could look to ‘images’ and ‘reviews’ results, in order to build trust with potential customers and help educate them directly from the SERP.

BrewDog remains the craft brewer with the most overall Universal Search appearances (6,562), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’ (4,900). On the other hand, Unity Brewing Co., reported the fewest overall Universal Search appearances (13) and should look for opportunities to increase this (such as asking past customers to leave an online review).

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. Beer sellers can look to their range of products for inspiration and guidance on longtail keyword strategy, including key terms such as ‘alcohol-free beer’ and ‘multipack IPA beer’ to make their website findable to prospective customers.

BrewDog has now secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (1,086) and continues to secure the most appearances for positions 4–10 (1,658). Longtail keywords are less competitive than short-tail keywords, helping to make a difference to a website’s search engine rankings.

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. Beer sellers can use Facebook ads to drive awareness of low-traffic bricks and mortar locations, along with generate visibility on key product lines.

We’ve included examples of Siren Craft Brew’s sponsored posts. This UK craft brewer used the same text across all posts but with a different image, suggesting their testing engagement rates — a wise strategy.

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. Generating informational content will help with longtail keyword performance (and ‘people also ask’ results), and beer sellers can look to include shareable content such as infographics to make on-site content engaging on social media.

BrewDog has the most Facebook Likes (486,000), while Beavertown Brewery has the most Instagram followers (147,200). Brands should experiment with posting at different times and days to see what gets the most engagement and refine their posting schedule based on engagement rates.

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 due to inaccessibility and frustration. Beer sellers should ensure their site is accessible for all.

Beavertown Brewery is still the craft brewer to watch, reporting 359 accessibility alerts (though, they’ve reduced this from 373 in our previous audit). To reduce and prevent accessibility alerts, websites should consider how perceivable their content/information is for a user, e.g., including captions for videos and alternative text for images.

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 Rory Tarplee..

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash