The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK theme parks has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK theme parks perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK theme parks has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK theme parks, including Alton Towers Resort, LEGOLAND, Thorpe Park, Paultons Park, Drayton Manor Resort, Flamingo Land Resort, Chessington World of Adventures Resort, Crealy Theme Park & Resort, Pleasure Beach Resort, Gulliver's Theme Park Resorts, Diggerland, and Lightwater Valley.

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 animal attractions to win brand exposure, sell online tickets, and even improve digital 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 Q1 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.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 theme parks on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK theme parks 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 retailer 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 theme parks was £135, 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 £9 . 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, both Drayton Manor Resort and Flamingo Land reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £0, followed by LEGOLAND at £1, and Chessington World of Adventures Resort has the highest at £75.

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, Diggerland has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £100, and LEGOLAND has the highest at £4,590.

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. It’s essential UK theme parks have easy-to-use websites that highlight the theme park’s facilities and will be a location for customers to purchase tickets. Brands should take into consideration clear pricing, pricing methods, and an up-to-date site containing important information about location, rides available, etc.

In our previous audit, Flamingo Land Resort reported 537 4xx errors. This quarter, Flamingo Land Resort has slightly decreased their 4xx errors by 2 points to a total of 535 — though they’re still the theme park to watch. 404 errors can frustrate visitors and lead to increased bounce rates, so brands should regularly implement 303 links to avoid this frustration.

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. Customers desire a website with quick-loading speeds, which will increase ticket sales. A slow-loading site will contain large, un-optimised images, videos, lots of information per page, heavy coding, and more.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 52 and 13, with Pleasure Beach Resort scoring the lowest speed and Lightwater Valley reporting the fastest mobile site speed. Mobile site speed can be correlated to conversion rates, so it’s important that these theme parks are taking steps to increase their mobile site speed to encourage users to complete their transactions.

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, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads.  Theme parks should be continually pushing to improve their DA, which they can achieve by adopting a PR for backlinks from high-authoritative websites. An active blog page and a fast site speed are also effective strategies to help improve the DA rating for each brand.

The DA score for this quarter ranged between 73 and 43, with Gulliver's Theme Park Resorts flagging the lowest DA score. This UK theme park should aim to receive quality backlinks from reputable sources, which they can obtain by building relationships with authoritative websites and, most importantly, uploading resourceful content to encourage theme backlinks.

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. An effective organic search strategy can set apart one brand from the next, and it helps to reduce the cost of sponsored advertisements. Companies should take care to monitor their keyword strategy and make suitable changes based on the results.

Only Lightwater Valley reported a decline in organic traffic on desktop (-15%), while 9 theme parks reported a decline on mobile. While consumers might be more likely to complete transactions on their desktop rather than a mobile, these theme parks should still ensure their website is mobile-friendly (easy to navigate on a smaller scene and fast loading speeds).

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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Theme parks should utilise all universal search features, as potential customers will want to see how previous customers have found their experience via 'reviews', 'FAQs', and 'people also ask'. This is also an opportunity to provide useful, quick content for commonly asked questions that show high potential for conversions.

Alton Towers Resort continues to secure the most Universal Search Results overall (14,641) — a slight decrease from 16,775 in our previous report. The majority of these results came from ‘images’ (8,400) followed by ‘people also ask’ (5,200).

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. There are many longtail keyword options that theme parks could use, such as ‘theme parks in north, UK’ and ‘theme parks for the family’.

Alton Towers Resort secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (4,347) and positions 4–10 (5,732). On the other hand, Diggerland flagged the fewest results for position 3 (101), and Lightwater Valley reported the fewest for positions 4–10 (179). All theme parks should regularly assess their keyword strategy to ensure they’re using low-volume, competitive phrases that’ll help to increase exposure through organic traffic.

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. Animal attractions can adopt a social media strategy to expand reach to help increase ticket sales.

We’ve included screenshots of Chessington World of Adventures Resort’s sponsored Facebook posts. This UK theme park used a combination of vertical videos and a vertical image to optimise their content for mobile 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. Social media could be especially useful for sharing information about entertainment and attraction updates.

Alton Towers Resort has most Facebook Likes (1.4 million) — double that of the runner up. Alton Towers Resort also has the most Instagram followers (280,400), with Thorpe Park close behind (220,300 followers). Social media provides direct customer engagement and is a cost-effective marketing strategy for theme parks to share their latest releases, offers and ticket options.

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. All theme parks should aim for zero contrast errors and zero accessibility errors on their websites to improve readability for those using a screen reader.

In our previous report, Flamingo Land Resort flagged 183 accessibility alerts. This quarter, Flamingo Land Resort is still the brand to watch and has increased their accessibility alerts to 188. Previously, Gulliver’s Theme Park Resorts reported 73 contrast errors. This quarter, Gulliver’s Theme Park has more than doubled their contrast errors to 158.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 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.