The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for home brands & accessories has has just been published. Learn how the top home brands & accessories perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for home brands & accessories has just been published. It covers the largest 10 home brands & accessories, including Graham and Green, AMARA, Anthropologie, Cuckooland.com, Oliver Bonas, Cox & Cox, Pooky Lights, Rockett St George, Olivia's, and Graham & Brown.

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 home brands to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and generate sales. 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 winning brand exposure, online growth and sales.

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 10 home brands on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing UK home brands, or request a copy of the report for the full review.

Request the report

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 Q1 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK home brands & accessories was £1,847, 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 £37 . 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, Anthropologie has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £1, and Graham & Brown has the highest at £227.

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, Anthropologie has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £43,400, and Rockett St George has the lowest at £400.

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. These home brands will want to ensure prospective customers can easily access key pages, such as product information and specifications, pricing, and product updates.

Cox & Cox flagged 233 4xx errors — the highest of all UK home brands & accessories. Brands can fix broken links by updating the link to the new URL, fixing typos in URLs, redirecting to relevant pages and even potentially removing the link.

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 home brands & accessories, they'll want to provide an excellent customer experience at every touchpoint, giving the impression of quick service from the moment a user steps virtual foot on their site.

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 65 and 15, with Cox & Cox reporting the lowest site speed and Cuckooland.com reporting the fastest mobile speed. A fast-loading website can reduce bounce rate, and, as most mobile users have a weaker connection on their mobile compared to a desktop device, it’s important that brands take steps to increase their mobile site 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. Home brands & accessories should create relationships with brands with a similar audience to adopt guest blogging in the hopes of increase the number of backlinks to their website.

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 85 and 48, with Olivia's reporting the lowest DA score. This brand should aim for quality backlinks over quantity. Building relationships with other brands in their niche is a great way to expand their backlinks.

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 cost-of-living crisis, it’s to be expected that brands will see a decrease in organic traffic due to consumers limiting the amount of money they spend on non-essential items.

Five of the brands saw a decline in organic traffic on desktop, while 8 reported a decrease on mobile. With this data in mind, UK home brands & accessories 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. Given that these home brands are in the retail industry, it’s to be expected that ‘images’ will be the most popular category for Universal Search results, and brands should ensure that images are properly sized and accurately and appropriately referenced through alt descriptions and captions.

Oliver Bonas remains the craft brewer with the most overall Universal Search appearances (153,143) — a slight reduction from 154,995 in our previous report. 

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. Our brands should be looking to optimise for keywords with high purchase/booking intent, that indicate a user at the lower part of the conversion funnel.

Oliver Bonas remains the brand to beat, with 4,805 appearances for position 3 and 11,905 appearances for positions 4–10. On the other hand, Cuckooland.com reported the fewest appearances for position 3 (123), though AMARA reported the fewest appearances for positions 4–10 (506). Securing appearances for positions 4–10 is a great way for brands to increase their online reach.

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 an effective way for UK home brands & accessories to share their latest releases and deals and expand their reach.

We’ve included examples of Pooky Lights’ sponsored posts. This brand utilised vertical videos to cater for users accessing social media from their mobile..

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. Home brands & accessories should focus on assessing the total engagement rate and not just focus on the number of followers, as assessing this category allows brands to see if their online followers are interested in their content.

Anthropologie has the most Facebook Likes (1.5 million) and the most Instagram followers (4.7 million). This vast difference between followers on different social media accounts shows that brands should be utilising platforms where their audience ‘hangs out’.

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. Any home brand must be particularly conscious of accessibility, from both a branding and potential customer perspective.

Cox & Cox is still the brand to watch with 254 accessibility alerts, which remains the exact same this quarter.

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 Mike Movassaghi.

Photo by Chloe Bolton on Unsplash