The Q2 2026 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 Q2 2026 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 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.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 theme parks on, check out our quick-look table below;
To understand what the *CTM Digital Performance Index™ is click here.
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.
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.
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 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 Q1 2026, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK theme parks was £11,8.9 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 £1. 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 Thorpe Pak reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £2, and Pleasure Beach Resort reported the highest at £196.
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, Thorpe Pak reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £2, and Pleasure Beach Resort reported the highest at £196.
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.
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 the most 404 errors (530). This quarter, Flamingo Land Resort remains the theme pak to watch, and they’ve since increased their total to 538. Repeated exposure to broken pages can reduce users’ willingness to explore a website further. Even if only a few links are affected, visitors may begin to assume that other pages will also be unreliable. This lack of confidence can lower overall engagement across the site.
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.
In our previous audit, Crealy Theme Park & Resort reported the slowest mobile site speed (26). This quarter, Crealy Theme Park & Resort has made immense progress to increase their mobile site speed to 60 (the fastest of all companies). Currently, the theme park at the bottom of the leaderboard is Drayton Manor Resort (4). Repeated experiences with slow mobile performance can make users less likely to return to a website in the future. Once visitors associate a site with delays and frustration, they may actively avoid using it again. This can harm customer loyalty and reduce long-term traffic growth.
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.
This quarter, Gulliver's Theme Park Resorts reported the lowest DA score (47). Websites with high domain authority may benefit from increased referral traffic through backlinks on other reputable sites. Because trusted websites are more likely to attract mentions and citations, they can receive visitors from multiple external sources. This diversifies traffic beyond search engines alone.
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.
Four brands reported a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, with Drayton Manor Resort, seeing the biggest loss (-23%). On mobile, four brands reported a decrease in organic traffic, with Alton Towers Resort seeing the biggest loss (-18%). Consumer habits continue to evolve as mobile browsing becomes increasingly dominant across many industries. Some websites may experience rising mobile organic traffic while desktop traffic gradually declines over time. Monitoring these differences helps businesses understand user behaviour and improve experiences across all devices.
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 appearances (13,620) — a decrease from 21,946 previously. The majority of their appearances came from ‘images’ (10,000).
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 continues to secure the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (4,453) — an increase from 4,265 previously. Alton Towers Report also continues to secure the most appearances for positions 4–10 (5,847) — a decrease from 6,389 previously. Using longtail keywords can help websites identify and respond to emerging search trends. As user behaviour evolves, new detailed search phrases often appear around specific topics or problems. Businesses that adapt quickly can gain valuable visibility before competition increases.
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 Crealy Theme Park & Resort’s sponsored Facebook posts. Videos can help brands grab attention far more quickly than plain text or static images on Facebook. As users scroll through busy feeds, moving visuals naturally stand out and encourage people to stop and engage with the 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 secured the most Facebook Likes (1.4m) — the same as our last report. Alton Towers Resort secured the most Instagram followers (307,600) — an increase from 301,100. Facebook was the most popular social media platforms of all brands. Drayton Manor Resort received the highest total engagement rate (3,851) and the highest average engagement (96).
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 received the most accessibility alerts (177). This quarter, Flamingo Land Resort remains the theme park to watch, and they’ve since increased their total to 181. They should aim to reduce their accessibility alerts because unnecessary interruptions may increase bounce rates. Visitors who struggle to use the site comfortably are more likely to leave before completing important actions.
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.