The Q2 2024 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 Q2 2024 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 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.

Q2 2024 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.

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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.

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.

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.

For Q2 2024, the mobile site speed ranged between 44 and 27, with no brands reporting above the recommend 50% for site speed. Oliver Bonas flagged the slowest site speed, and it should reduce image size — especially given that its website is predominantly made up of images.

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 for this quarter ranged between 84 and 48, with Olivia's flagging the lowest DA. This home brand also saw the least number of backlinks, and it should also regularly post content to its blog page to ensure readers have another reason to visit their website and to increase organic traffic.

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.

Cuckooland.com the lowest organic traffic for both mobile (-49% and desktop (-48%). Pooky Lights reported the most significant organic traffic increase for both mobile (+146%) and desktop (122%).

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 saw the most Universal Search results (107,762), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’. Three of the brands reported zero appearances for ‘reviews’, and they adopt a marketing strategy toencourage customers to leave a review after a purchase.  

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. Holiday parks 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 reported the most longtail keywords (3,604 in positions 3 and 10,064 in positions 4–10). Reporting a high number of appearances in positions 4–10 is a quick and effective way for a brand to increase reach online.

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.

We’ve included 3 examples of Cox & Cox sponsored Facebook posts. This brand used 2 vertical videos and 1 vertical image, catering 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. 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.

Seen of the brands favoured Pinterest — a wise approach to increase organic traffic and cater to an audience that favours luxury goods. Graham & Brown reported the highest total engagement — nearly double that of the runner-up.

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.

In Q2 2024, Olivia's 621 accessibility alerts. Upon closer inspection, the majority of these alerts were due to suspicious alternative text. This brand should assess its links to check that it’s not redirecting consumers to incorrect links.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q2 2024 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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