The Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK pet supplies has just been published. Learn how the top 9 UK pet supply retailers perform across the digital space.
The latest Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK pet supply retailers has just been published. It covers the largest 9 pet supply retailers trading in the UK, including Pets at Home, Petplanet.co.uk, Jollyes - The Pet People, Pets & Friends, Pet Drugs Online, VioVet, Zooplus, Animed Direct, and petshop.co.uk.
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 pet supply retailers to win brand exposure, drive traffic online, and even increase in-store footfall, 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 Q3 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 9 pet supply retailers on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing pet supply retailers, or request a copy of the report for the full review.
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site 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 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.
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. Brands within the pet supplies space will be juggling huge volumes of products for a wide range of different animals and breeds. They’ll want to ensure potential customers can easily find what they need and aren’t met with dead ends if looking for specialist products.
Pets & Friends reported a significant number of 4xx errors (14,358), and this large number suggests that there could be broken links on the website’s footer. Frequent or significant 4xx errors can lead to a decrease in user engagement and there’s the risk of lost conversions, too.
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. For pet owners looking for food and other supplies, they’ll want to access what they’re looking for quickly, especially when items are needed urgently.
In our previous audit, Pets & Friends reported the slowest mobile site (7). This quarter, Pets & Friends reported a score of 8, showing a slight improvement — and any enhancement should be acknowledged. With that in mind, this is still the pet supply retailer to watch, and it can improve its mobile site speed by limiting preloaders and animations, using a responsive mobile-friendly theme, and resizing images to save bandwidth.
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. Brands in the pet supplies sector can look to collaborate with animal bloggers, and run pet breed based PR campaigns to gain exposure and backlinks.
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 rating for this quarter ranged between 73 and 37, with 7 of the 9 pet supply retailers scoring in the ‘good’ zone or above. However, the brand to watch is Pets & Friends, which also reported the fewest backlinks. This pet supply should monitor if there are any broken backlinks being directed to its website and contact the creator to ask them to update the link with a replacement. Additionally, regularly updating its blog with relevant, useful content for its target audience will encourage more websites to offer backlinks.
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. We’ve seen organic traffic fall for retailers across many of the sectors we specialise in, mostly in response to the cost of living crisis, as consumers cut back on essential items. For pet suppliers, they may feel this impact by pet owners opting for less specialist products, that may be available in their local supermarket for a lower cost.
Two of the pet supply retailers saw a decline in organic traffic on desktop, and 5 reported a decline on mobile. All brands should ensure their website is mobile-friendly (fast download speeds, an easy-to-use interface, a quick checkout process, etc.), as this will help to encourage users to access their website from a mobile.
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 retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Pet supply retailers could look to ‘reviews’ and ‘people also ask’ results, in order to build trust with potential customers and help educate them directly from the SERP.
Jollyes - The Pet People secured the highest Universal Search appearances (34,678), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’. All pet supply retailers but one secured most of their appearances from ‘reviews’, which is wise given that most consumers prefer to read past customers’ experiences.
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. Pet supply retailers can look to their range of products for inspiration and guidance on longtail keyword strategy, including key terms such as ‘next day delivery’ and product weights to appear for users showing high-purchase intent.
Pets at Home continues to secure the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (11,277) and positions 4–10 (20,363). VioVet has a strong chance of moving up the scoreboard for position 3, as it’s reporting more appearances for positions 4–10 than Animed Direct.
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. Pet supply retailers can use Facebook ads to drive awareness of low-traffic bricks and mortar locations, along with generate visibility on key product lines.
We’ve included an example of Jollyes - The Pet People’s sponsored post. This pet supply retailer included emojis throughout its text, which is a great way to incorporate personality and inject a friendly tone. However, it should refrain from using the same text and image for more than one post to prevent repetitive ads.
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. Generating informational content will help with longtail keyword performance (and ‘people also ask’ results), and pet supply retailers can look to include shareable content such as infographics to make on-site content engaging on social media.
Pets at Home has the largest Facebook page (527,200 Likes) and Instagram account (236,700 followers). However, petshop.co.uk reported the highest total engagement (14,536), which is an important metric for retailers to monitor.
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. Pet supply retailers should ensure their site is accessible for all as vision deficiency does not exclude pet ownership. In fact, pet supply retailers are in the unique position that at least some of their customers will be shopping for guide dogs or other assistance animals!
Animed Direct is still the one to watch for accessibility alerts (currently 477 and 480 in our previous report). This pet supply retailer should check alt text is added to all images, closed captions and transcripts are included in videos, users can zoom in and out of the website without it affecting the website’s layout, etc.
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.