The Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK online learning providers has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK online learning providers perform across the digital space.
The Q2 2025 benchmarking report for UK online learning providers has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national online learning providers, including Open Study College, Oxbridge, Online Learning College, ICS Learn, Learndirect, Udemy, FutureLearn, Stonebridge College, NCC, Avado, LearnPac, and Reed.
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 UK online learning companies to develop their brand’s voice, assess and up-level their domain authority score, track their organic traffic performance, and more. This report highlights the areas where brands are succeeding and categories where they could make improvements.
To see a preview and contents page of the Q2 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key take-aways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
Q2 2025 Winners LEaderboard
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 online learning providers on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing online learning providers, or request a copy of the report for the full review.
What The Industry Research Report Covers
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each brand 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 under-perform. 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 online learning providers was £11,681, 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 £71 . 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, FutureLearn reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £5, and Stonebridge College has the highest at £640.
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, Stonebridge College has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £1,280, and Udemy has the highest at £373,000.
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. UK online learning companies should aim to make their website as error-free as possible to improve the trust consumers have in their brand as well as enhance their SEO performance.
In our previous report, Learndirect flagged 111 4xx errors. This quarter, Learndirect remains the provider to watch, and they’ve increased their 4xx errors to 309. This online learning provider should monitor their internal links, checking that they direct to the promised page and that there’s no issue with the page working.
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. It’s important that a website doesn’t take any longer than 3 seconds to load, as any longer can cause a consumer to grow impatient and leave. Choosing a mobile-friendly theme is an effective way of boosting a brand’s site speed.
The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 65 and 16, with Stonebridge College receiving the slowest mobile site speed. This online learning provider should consider steps to increase their mobile site speed, such as using a lightweight website theme, utilising lazy loading and disabling unnecessary plugs, which can be decreasing download speeds.
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. UK online learning companies should focus on building their domain authority by building relationships with websites that have a similar target audience to increase the number of high-quality backlinks.
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 for this quarter ranged between 91 and 26, with LearnPac reporting the lowest DA. This online learning provider should look for opportunities to increase the quality and quantity of their backlinks. For example, they could write valuable content for guest blogs and/or creating newsworthy content that encourages other websites to backlink to them.
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. UK online learning companies should track and assess their organic performance and pay close attention to the difference in results based on devices. Due to the nature of this industry, it’s expected that they’ll receive more traffic from users on a desktop.
Eight brands saw a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, with LearnPac reporting the biggest decrease (-51%). Meanwhile, 9 brands saw a decrease on mobile, with LearnPac reporting the biggest decrease (-98%). All online learning providers should ensure their website is optimised for mobile to encourage users to considering visiting their website on mobile, too.
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, and a site can appear for Universal Search results without being strong in standard rankings. UK online learning companies will want to ensure they have a strong performance for 'reviews' and ‘people also ask to help increase their online rankings.
Reed secured the most Universal Search appearances (12,379), with the majority of these coming from ‘people also ask’ (11,000). Other online learning providers can increase their results for this category by including phrases from ‘people also ask’ throughout their website, such as in headings.
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. UK online learning companies can optimise their keyword strategy by incorporating phrases of 3+ words, such as ‘online learning company’ or ‘home learning provider.’
Reed secured the most longtail keyword appearances on desktop for position 3 (10,970) and positions 4–10 (56,831). Given that these results were so much higher than the runner up, we expect Reed to 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) forecast to hit over 42 million users by 2022, 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 any online learning provider, Facebook ads are an opportunity to drive traffic to specific courses. If they haven’t already done so, they should be identifying under-subscribed courses to promote to improve numbers or using organic search term volumes as a guide for where general consumer interest lies.
We’ve included screenshots of ICS Learn’s sponsored Facebook posts. This online learning provider should consider diversifying their content to ensure they’re not repeating the same text across all posts, which can be off-putting for social media 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 brand engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. UK online learning companies will need to have a strong online presence so that consumers have the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the brand first before making a purchase. Social media is also a great opportunity to reach new audiences and build its customer base.
Udemy has the most Facebook Likes (8.4 million) and the most Instagram followers (3.5 million). All online learning providers should approach social media as a platform to build relationships with their consumers rather than a tactic to solely sell their services, as this could disengage their online audience
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. Brands should focus on reducing accessibility alerts, errors, and contrast errors to improve readability for those using a screen reader.
Oxbridge reported 80 accessibility alerts and 112 contrast errors — the highest of all providers. These alerts and errors can exclude users with disabilities, making it more difficult for them to read or navigate websites.
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 Rory Tarplee..
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