The Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK parcel delivery companies has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK parcel delivery companies perform across the digital space.
The latest Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK Parcel delivery companies has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national parcel delivery companies, including Parcelforce, ParcelHero, DPD, DPD Local, Yodel, APC Overnight, UPS, Royal Mail, Parcel 2 Go, DHL, Evri, and Interparcel - it highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons in 20+ online performance metrics.
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 parcel delivery companies to win brand exposure locally, online orders and in-store footfall. 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 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.
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.
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.
We noted that Royal Mail are missing 31 page titles. Though other parcel delivery companies are missing many meta descriptions, missing page titles cause more damage to a site’s SEO. If these are pages Royal Mail want to rank organically, they must consider adding page titles and ensuring meta descriptions are up to date.
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.
Only three of the parcel delivery companies we reviewed secured at least an ‘okay’ score of 50-90. Evri scored the lowest for mobile page speed with a concerning score of only 7. With the brand newly-launching, it could be down to a new website not being sufficiently tested before going live, and needing some post-launch optimisations to improve performance.
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 gage of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, ie. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads.
Domain authority is considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. ‘Good’ DA score depends on the competition level of the industry. However, a ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing. In our research, UK parcel delivery companies saw their domain authorities range from an incredible score of 91, down to a still-strong 62. For parcel delivery companies, link building can come as easily as simply being a shipping option for reputable brands, helping to explain these high scores sector-wide.
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.
Of our 12 parcel delivery companies, eight saw either no increase or a decline in mobile traffic year-on-year. Of these eight, Parcel2Go saw the biggest decrease of 33%. In fact, the five brands with the lowest traffic overall all saw either a decrease or 0% increase in traffic, while any increases were gained by larger companies. If these smaller brands want to improve their visibility against these giants, they must review their organic strategy and uncover any unused opportunities.
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.
People Also Ask questions seem to be the most popular universal search result UK parcel delivery companies are optimising for, with Royal Mail achieving a huge 5,800 People Also Ask Results (the most of all brands). While other parcel delivery companies may struggle to overtake the widely known brand of Royal Mail, this is still a useful avenue to reach potential customers with generic queries.
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.
Parcel Hero are ranking in the top 3 for only 62 longtail keywords, and only 5,701 overall. An initial point for Parcel Hero to improve on is focusing on improving visibility for some of the 5,639 longtail keywords they are currently ranking for outside of the top 3.
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.
Below, we can see Evri’s Facebook ads, building awareness of their new brand. Paid activity is a great way of building awareness of new businesses (or simply new branding) as it gives a better guarantee that your content will be widely noted. Evri will have a good, solid basis to build up organic activity from the back of this campaign.
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.
DHL have increased their content production lately and achieved high engagement levels to match. In May, DHL produced more than 60 articles of content and recorded 18,000 engagements in response. Meanwhile, Parcel Hero appear to be producing no content at all (Buzzsumo, June 2022). We already know that Parcel Hero must improve their organic strategy to win visibility and producing content should be considered a vital part of their next move.
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.
DPD’s 75 alerts are cause for concern, along with their 42 errors. Though DPD appear to be on top of any contrast errors, with only a minimum being recorded, they must assess how else they can make their site more accessible for everyone needing to send a parcel.
User Journeys & Conversion Rate Performance
3.42 seconds are all it takes for a user to judge a site solely on its appearance. For sites with a low clarity score, this means users are getting a poor impression of your brand and aren’t seeing your vital cues to convert.
DPD Local achieved the poorest clarity score of 64%, with DPD only two point ahead, on 66%. With all other parcel delivery companies achieving a score of at least 75%, DPD must improve both their website’s usability to narrow this gap and avoid losing customers to website frustrations.
Additionally, we use attention maps to judge user behaviour and assess how customers are interacting with a site. You can see from these examples just how wildly different site designs can impact user attention;
Q2 2022 Winners and Losers Summary
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 8 parcel delivery companies on, check out our quick-look table below;
If you want to explore how you can improve your performance relative to your competitors, reduce media spend wastage and drive more performance from less, read the 10 Week Performance Accelerator Programme for CMO’s & Marketing Leaders.
Get the full 70-page Q2 2022 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 Phil Robinson.
Photo by Joshua Lawrence on Unsplash
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