The Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK sleep brands has just been published. Learn how the top 10 UK sleep brands perform across the digital space.
28th June 2022
The latest Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK Sleep Brands has just been published. It covers the largest 10 national sleep brands, including Woolroom, Silent Night, Emma, Otty, Tempur, Dormeo, Sleepeezee, Eve, Hypnos, and Simba - 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 share online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other sleep brands to win digital brand exposure, and secure online orders. 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
Many 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.
Many of the UK sleep brands have varying degrees of technical errors that will be hindering organic traffic and conversion performance. An example here is Tempur seeing 154 pages with missing meta descriptions and 140 with missing page titles. These are essential for helping users (and search engines!) understand what’s on your pages before they click onto them from a SERP and, without them, Tempur risk compromising their organic ranking and traffic on these pages.
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.
In our research, we discovered that none of the UK’s sleep brands are achieving even an ‘ok’ mobile page speed score, between 50-89. Emma is the closest to achieving this, but with a load speed of 5 seconds for largest contentful paint there is still room for improvement.
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 generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. However, a ‘Good’ DA score really depends on the competition level of your industry. In our research, UK sleep brand domain authorities range from 36 to 74. Sleepeezee are sitting at the bottom of this scale and should consider looking at potential link building campaigns to catch up with the stronger players.
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.
Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. Only three of our UK sleep brands have achieved a rise in organic mobile traffic year-on-year, while the brand who has fallen the most is Silent Night, which saw a reduction in traffic of 46%.
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.
When retailing big-ticket items such as beds and mattresses, reviews are an essential part of the conversion funnel as they help consumers feel they’re making a solid decision and investment. Five of our sleep brands have spotted this opportunity so have a significant amount of reviews on site (with Simba leading the way with 3,700 reviews). Another useful organic search feature to rank for, in order to capture users looking for information, is ‘People Also Ask’ questions, which Dormeo have secured appearances for for 599 questions.
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.
As well as ranking for a high number of ‘People Also Ask’ queries, Dormeo are appearing for 1,041 long-tail keywords within the top 4. With these queries having strong conversion-potential, sleep brands must pay attention and include them in their SEO strategy.
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 how Sleepeezee are appealing to the UK as a nation of animal lovers, by featuring their line of pet beds as a product image in one ad and with some furry friends taking them for a spin in a second. A dog even features in the third ad, for (their human beds!), showing a clever way to link products together and show them as a brand for pet-lovers.
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.
Sleepeezee have the most consistent content production strategy, with engagement levels to match their content output. However, both Simba and Eve are showing high peaks in engagement outside of their peaks in content creation – this indicates either strong, stand out pieces of content being produced at these points, or, long-lasting content that has enduring appeal.
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.
Eve have proved themselves the most accessible site for those with visual disabilities, recording just 2 contrast errors. This indicates that Eve have developed their website with this in mind and have avoided placing any text on a similarly coloured background – not something that’s easy to do when your brand colour is yellow (and we would know!).
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.
Silent Night achieved a clarity score of a huge 90%, indicating a great deal of care has been taken to ensure the website is clear, the information is easy to get hold of, and that Silent Night are capturing their users' attention immediately.
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 12 sleep brands 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 Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash
Let's be social
Join our growing social communities to learn more about the benefits of digital marketing and the people who make us tick.