The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK bike retailers has just been published. Learn how the top 101UK bike retailers perform across the digital space.
The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for bike retailers has just been published. It covers the largest 11 bike retailers, including Evans Cycles, Wiggle, Chain Reaction, Tredz Bikes, Merlin Cycles, SIGMA Sports United, Leisure Lakes Bikes, Tweeks Cycles, 99 Bikes, Winstanleys Bikes, and Wheelbase Shop.
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 bike retailers to expand brand awareness and enhance their website navigation, speed, and more to increase traffic and conversions. This report also 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.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 11 bike retailers on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing online learning providers, or request a copy of the report for the full review.
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.
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 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these UK bike retailers was £2,404 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 £7.18 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively. In this quarter, 99 Bikes (UK) has the highest budget wastage at £9,120, and Chain Reaction has the lowest budget wastage at £23.
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, Wiggle has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £1, and Wheelbase has the highest at £20.
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, Wheelbase has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £60,800, and Wiggle has the lowest at £154.
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. Bike retailers should monitor website errors to deliver a quality user experience, which includes fixing broken links to help with SEO, organic search traffic, crawability, and more.
Evans Cycles reported the most 4xx errors (67). UK bike retailers can rreduce their 4xx errors by regularly checking their website for broken internal links, updating external links and redirecting missing pages.
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. Page speed makes a big difference as to whether a consumer will remain on the website or potentially visit it again. All bike retailers should undergo methods to increase site speed, such as using a mobile-friendly theme and including lazy loading.
The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 68 and 9, with Wheelbase flagging the lowest speed. Wheelbase should take steps to increase their mobile site speed to at least 50%, as a healthy mobile site speed can enhance the user’s web experience and improve retention and repeat visitors.
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, ie. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Page speed makes a big difference as to whether a consumer will remain on the website or potentially visit it again. All bike retailers should undergo methods to increase site speed, such as using a mobile-friendly theme and including lazy loading.
A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA score for this quarter ranged between 72 and 33, with Winstanleys Bikes flagging the lowest DA score. This bike retailer can increase their domain authority by focusing on uploading quality content, writing valuable content for other reputable websites, find and fix broken links on their website, and more.
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. During the cost-of-living crisis, we can expect to see a fluctuation in organic traffic on both devices, given that consumers are being more cautious of spending their money. However, bike retailers can see follow a strategy to increase their organic traffic, such as creating high-quality content and following a keyword strategy.
Three of the UK bike retailers saw a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, while 7 saw a decrease on mobile. Both Wiggle and Chain Reaction are the brands to watch, as they both reported at the bottom of the leaderboard for both 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 brand can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. To help increase rankings in SERPs, bike retailers should focus on ‘images’ and ‘reviews’, which requires optimising visuals and encouraging past customers to leave an online review.
Evans Cycles secured the most Universal Search appearances (32,596), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’ and ‘reviews’. On the other hand, Chain Reaction reported the least overall Universal Search appearances (42). All brands should aim to secure Universal Search appearances to help with their rankings in search engines.
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. Bike retailers should have a longtail keyword strategy to help increase their organic traffic and searchability online. Phrases they could use may increase ‘sports hybrid bikes’, ‘full suspension mountain bike’, and more.
Evans Cycles received the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (4,472) and 7,512 appearances for positions 4–10. Ranking in positions 4–10 can bring consistent, organic traffic, especially for longtail keywords
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.
We’ve included examples of Sigma Sport’s sponsored posts. Since Facebook is a visual platform, using images or videos that complement the text is important. The visual aspect can often convey more information than text alone.
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 a long period of time. It's great for your engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Bike Retailers can create shareable social content that details new stock, the latest industry news, and information that’s relevant to their target audience.
Chain Reaction has the most Facebook Likes (988,600), and Tredz Bikes has the most Instagram followers (100,800). Tweeks Cycles has the most total engagement of all bike retailers (1,915).
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 aren’t designed to meet these needs, brands lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Websites that aren’t accessible can frustrate consumers, resulting in them losing trust in your brand. Bike retailers should regularly assess their contrast errors, accessibility alerts, and errors to avoid negatively impacting readability for those with a colour vision deficiency or those using a screen reader.
Merlin Cycles flagged the most accessibility alerts (96). This bike retailer can reduce these accessibility alerts by solving missing alt text for images; fixing insufficient colour contrasts; providing clear, actionable steps and more.
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.