The Q2 2022 benchmarking report for sleep retailers has just been published. Learn how the top 9 UK sleep retailers perform across the digital space.
28th June 2022
The latest Q2 2022 benchmarking report for UK Sleep Retailers has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national sleep retailers, including Bensons for Beds, And So To Bed, Beds.co.uk, Mattress Online, Bedstar, Dreams, CrazyPriceBeds.com, Soak & Sleep, Land of Beds, Feather & Black, Mattressman, and Mattress Next Day - 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 retailers 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
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 retailers have varying degrees of technical errors that will be hindering organic traffic and conversion performance. An example includes And So To Bed seeing 772 4xx errors on their site. And So To Bed will find redirects in these areas are significantly more powerful for conversion performance, as they provide users an alternative product rather than a complete dead end.
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 the only sleep retailer achieving an ‘ok’ mobile page speed score is Mattress Next Day, with all other brands falling short of the 50-89 score range. Looking in more detail at mobile core web vitals, we can see that Dreams have a score of 16.3 seconds when it comes to largest contentful paint. This matters more for your page speed index score than any other metric as it measures the time it takes for the largest above the fold content element to load. Dreams, along with the other brands falling short in this area, must look to improve this to avoid losing customers due to poor [age experience, especially when dealing with selling high-price point items such as beds and mattresses!
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. In our research, UK sleep retailer domain authorities range from 16 to 70 – an incredibly broad scale which Dreams are sitting comfortably at the top of.
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. We discovered that of all the supermarkets in our report, only Mattress Man and Feather and Black have gained organic mobile traffic year on year. With Mattress Man gaining 62% more traffic than last year, this indicates Mattress Man have a strong SEO strategy that’s paying off among declining consumer spending.
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. Most of our sleep retailers have spotted this opportunity so have a significant amount of reviews on site (with Dreams recording a massive 4,900!). However, with both Beds.co.uk and Feather & Black showing for zero reviews, this is an area they should be keen to grow.
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.
Dreams are also strong in this category, recording 7,302 long tail keywords in the top 4. This indicates a strong strategy that is considerate of these crucial, conversion-ready keywords. Sleep retailers should pay particular attention to these long-tail keywords as an opportunity to answer questions about products or new sleep technology, such as “what are the benefits of memory foam”.
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 Soak and Sleep are using Facebook ads to educate users about new products and their benefits, as well as show them within a trendy, lifestyle focused way. With these Facebook ads standing out from the straight forward product images that other sleep retailers use, they’ll be a perfect organic fit into many Facebook users’ newsfeeds.
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.
Both Bensons for Beds and Land of Beds have shown their content engagement peaks over the past year have not fallen in line with the amount of articles posted. Though this may set alarm bells ringing, what this actually means is either that their content is long lasting and relevant, or they have produced stand-out content pieces that have strongly boosted total brand engagement (showing us that quality should be a focus as much as quantity!).
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.
Though we’ve seen that Dreams is a stand out performer for many metrics, their 259 alerts pose a significant problem for the brand. Dreams should think carefully about how they improve their accessibility for users and ensure nothing on the site is likely to make anyone turn elsewhere out of frustration.
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.
Dreams achieved a clarity score of 59%. With the highest score we recorded coming in at 77%, Dreams must make improvements to their readability, usability, and competitor benchmarking to improve their user experience and better craft their journeys.
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 retail 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 Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash
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