The Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK sleep brands has just been published. Learn how the top 10 UK sleep brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK sleep brands has just been published. It covers the largest 10 national sleep brands, including Silent Night, Tempur, Sleepeezee, Emma, OTTY, Dormeo, Simba, Vispring, Eve, and Hypnos.

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 sleep brands to win brand exposure, generate online orders, and drive in-store recognition (where relevant). 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 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 11 sleep brands on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK sleep 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 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 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. Sleep brands will want to keep on top of changing stock lines in order to ensure customers can easily find the product that suits their specific needs.

In Q1 2024, Dormeo returned 332 4xx errors, which it must address before the next quarter. This sleep brand should check for any misspellings on URLs and amend any broken links, which can lead customers down dead ends.

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. With many sleep brands' products looking similar, they will be keen to ensure their items stand out with high-quality lifestyle images, and graphics & videos talking through their products' benefits. However, assets like this can easily bring down site speed performance, if not properly optimised.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 50 and 5, with Sleepeezee in last place. This sleep brand should reduce its amount of content on a single page to help increase this score. Emma is the only company that scored 50 (the minimum recommend speed brands should aim for). Emma’s homepage contains small images, which reduce download times — something the other brands in this report should also apply.

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. Sleep brands can look to build domain authority by collaborating with publications and bloggers within their niche. Spotting opportunities for evergreen content, that can be publicised more heavily around events such as 'national sleep day', helps create long-lasting links that will stay relevant all year round.

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 range for this quarter ranged between 74 and 36, with Sleepeezee scoring the lowest. Sleepeezee is in the bottom 3 for the total number of backlinks, which it should look to increase to help improve its DA rating before the next quarter.

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. Typically, most brands in non-essential sectors are seeing falls in traffic year on year, and potential customers are likely to delay big purchases, like mattresses and beds, unless absolutely necessary.

Six of the 10 brands encountered a loss in organic mobile traffic compared to the previous year, with Eve suffering a 60% loss. On the other end of the scale, Silent Night saw an 81% increase in mobile traffic YoY — which could be in relation to its excellent longtail keyword strategy.

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. For sleep brands, making good use of the 'reviews' universal search result will allow them to build trust in customers directly from the SERP.

Silent Night reported the most appearances for overall Universal Searches, with a score of 29,549 — over 2.5 times as many as the runner up. Silent Night saw most of this score from ‘reviews’. The other sleep brands should also look for strategies to increase their appearances for ‘reviews’, as 6 of 10 reported zero appearances for this category.

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. Sleep brands should be looking to include high conversion-potential longtail keywords in their strategy, such as 'memory foam king mattress next day delivery', as these indicate users looking for products with immediate availability.

Silent Night is at the top of the leaderboard across all sections for longtail keyword appearances. Dormeo is third place for the top 100 appearances in search engines but is in second place for appearances in the top 3 search engines, demonstrating that it’s implemented a successful keyword strategy.

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 provide an opportunity for sleep brands to quickly reach audiences with offers, new lines, and key products they’re looking to push.

We’ve included examples of Eve’s Facebook posts. This brand used a combination of a carousel and an image across two posts. Eve should look to incorporate a video into its future sponsored posts, as mix and matching formats can drive 86% more conversions

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. For sleep brands, they can look to create content that is topical for seasonal events but can remain relevant all year round, such as cooling mattress technology that can work alongside both summer and winter duvets for optimal comfort.

Meta remains the platform of choice for sleep brands, with Tempur retaining the highest volume of Facebook likes, with 408,400. Emma has the largest amount of Instagram followers, with a total of 49,700. Brands with large organic social followings will reduce their need to rely on paid advertising to promote organic content.

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 blue often being a favoured brand colour for sleep brands, they must ensure that contrast is sufficient enough to make their content readable.

Tempur holds the number spot for the largest Facebook page with 407,800 likes, and Emma has the largest Instagram following (53,600). Emma’s Instagram account shows the brand going beyond selling products, as it showcases behind-the-scenes footage donating products to those in need and content of interactions with the public through entertaining games.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 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.

Photo by Gabriel Alenius on Unsplash