The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK online banking companies has just been published. Learn how the top 7 UK online banking companies perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK online banking companies has just been published. It covers the largest 7 national online banking companies, including Starling Bank, Tandem, Monzo, Chase, Atom bank, Revolut, and Monese.

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 online banking companies to win brand exposure, generate online views, and drive sign-ups for new accounts. 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 7 online banking companies on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing online banking 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 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 online banking companies was £30,051, 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 £26 . 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, Revolut has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £9, and Starling Bank has the highest at £140.

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, Starling Bank has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £58,000, and Revolut has the highest at £1,150,000.

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 online banking companies, their website is one of the most important components of their business. It is therefore vital for their site to be running smoothly to ensure their customers can easily navigate to key conversion points.

In our previous audit, Monese reported 1,447 4xx errors. This quarter, Monese has reduced their 4xx errors to 442, though they’re still the company with the highest 4xx errors. They could further decrease this figure by auditing their website and including replacement links for broken links to ensure they’re not directing visitors to a broken page.

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 online banking companies, their customers need to have full and absolute trust in their brand. A slow, lagging mobile site will not ensure the customer has trust and may lead them to try other businesses instead.

In our previous audit, Monese reported the slowest mobile site speed (28). This quarter, is still the brand with the slowest mobile site speed, but they’ve increased their score to 34. On the other hand, Starling Bank has the fastest mobile site speed (63). All online banking companies should aim for no longer than 3 seconds for their website to load, as any longer could deter visitors from remaining on their 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 isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Online banking companies should be continually pushing to improve their DA and can look to creating interesting content and studies around money management and finances that will gain press attention and links back to their sites.

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 score for this quarter ranged between 84 and 61, with Tandem reporting the lowest score and Revolut scoring the highest score. All UK online banking companies should follow a PR strategy to develop close relationships with authoritative websites that have a similar target audience to encourage more (and quality) backlinks to their website.

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 online banks increasing in popularity, especially post-pandemic, we would expect all the companies to be seeing increases in their mobile and desktop traffic.

Three of the companies reported a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, while 5 companies saw a decrease on mobile. With this in mind, all companies should ensure their website is easily accessible and responsive on mobile devices, otherwise they risk losing traffic.

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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Online banking companies should be utilising all Universal Search opportunities, as prospective customers will be interested to see how previous and existing account holders have found their experience. This can particularly be achieved with 'reviews', 'FAQs' and 'people also ask' results.

Revolut continues to secure the most overall Universal Search appearances (151,447), with 120,700 of these coming from ‘people also ask’. Other companies can increase their results for this category by using common phrases from ‘people also ask’ taken from search engines and using these phrases throughout their website.

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. There are many longtail keyword options that online banking companies could be using, and they should look to prioritise keywords which include high purchase intent phrases such as 'switch now', or 'reward for switching'.

Revolut remains the company to beat, with 47,337 longtail keyword appearances for position 3 and 64,021 appearances for positions 4–10. This company has nearly 10 times more than the follow-up company, suggesting that they’re remain at the top of the leaderboard in the next quarter, too.

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. Social media is a great way to advertise for online banking companies as their potential customers are already online. Online banks should consider mobile-first ad formats, that will provide a seamless experience for mobile users, especially where an app is essential for signing up.

We’ve included examples of Monzo’s sponsored posts. This company included brightly coloured images that are on brand and used minimal text to encourage users to stop and read their posts.

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. As with building content for digital PR strategies, online banks can look to create highly engaging, shareable content that details interesting facts about spending, or money management advice.

Chase has the most Facebook Likes (3.8 million), while Revolut has the most Instagram followers (362,700). This shows that a brand can be more popular on one social media app compared to another and that they should follow where their audience is.

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. With online banking companies gaining momentum, and their services being relevant to all demographics, they need to ensure that their websites are accessible to everyone.

In our previous audit, Monese flagged 372 accessibility alerts. This quarter, Monese is still the brand to watch, but they’ve reduced their alerts to 357. Some ways they can further decrease these include using proper headings (e.g., ‘heading 2 rather than ‘normal text’), check instructions are styled properly and make sense (e.g., ‘click this link), assess that links make sense (e.g., you’re directing visitors to a page that matches the anchor text).

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.

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