The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK car buying companies has just been published. Learn how the top 10 UK car buying companies perform across the digital space.
The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK car buying companies has just been published. It covers the largest 10 national car buying companies, including Big Motoring World, Cargiant, CarSupermarket.com, Motorpoint, Carcraft, CarShop, cinch, Perrys Motor Sales and heycar.
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 car buying companies to win brand exposure, drive online views, and ultimately yield car purchase enquiries. 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 takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 10 car buying companies on, check out our quick-look table below;
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 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.
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 car buying companies was £10,554, 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, Big Motoring World, Cargiant and Carcraft have the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £3, and Perrys Motor Sales has the highest at £37.
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, Perrys Motor Sales has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £1,610, and CarSupermarket.com has the highest at £287,000.
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. For car buying companies, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for drivers needing to enquire about buying options and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages, such as contact forms or 'request a call' options.
Cargiant flagged the most 4xx errors (115). Too many 404 errors can affect crawling and indexing, preventing important pages from showing up in search results.
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. Car buying companies need to ensure their customers have a positive experience on their site or they may just move to another company – especially if specific times have been promise, e.g. a quote in only 30 seconds.
In our previous audit, heycar reported the slowest mobile site speed (36). This quarter, heycar is no longer at the bottom of the scoreboard, but they’ve decreased their mobile site speed to 34. Currently, Cargiant is the car buying company to watch, as they reported a mobile site speed of 27. On the other hand, MOTORS received the fastest score (60) — and all companies should aim for a score of 50+.
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. Car buying brands should be continually pushing to improve their DA by sharing great quality content about their products and what makes/models they have in stock.
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 score ranged between 71 and 23, with Carcraft reporting the lowest DA score and MOTORS reporting the highest DA score. Keep in mind that DA scores are also based on a website’s trustworthiness. So companies should take steps to remove broken links, optimise on-page SEO (such as internal linking and meta tags) 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. With the increase in electric vehicles over the past few years, now would be a great time to push the ‘out with the old, in with the new’ narrative.
Three car buying companies saw a decline in organic traffic on desktop (compared to 2 in our previous audit). Meanwhile, 6 saw a decline on mobile (which is an improvement from 8 companies in our previous audit). Carcraft is the company to watch, as they saw the biggest loss on both desktop (-38%) and mobile (-42%).
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. Car-buying brands should be utilising all universal search features as potential customers will be interested to see how previous customers have found their experience via 'reviews', 'FAQs' and 'people also ask', and may also be looking for information about specific models they are interested in.
MOTORS remains the company to beat, reporting 140,346 overall Universal Search appearances this quarter — an increase from 134,202 previously. On the other hand, Carcraft received the fewest overall appearances (463). This company should look for opportunities to expand their reach online.
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 retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index. There are many longtail keyword options car buying companies could be using such as ‘car buyers near me’, 'best used vehicles near me' and ‘where to sell my car’.
MOTORS continues to be the car buying company to beat for longtail keyword appearances, with 28,052 appearances for position 3 and 43,100 for positions 4–10. MOTORS saw an increase in appearances for position 3 but a decrease in positions 4–10 compared to our previous audit.
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. For UK car buying companies, Facebook ads are an opportunity to promote new cars to help increase sales.
We’ve included examples of cinch’s sponsored posts. This UK car buying company used branding across each image, though they should aim to use unique text across each post to entice users to convert to sales.
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 retailer 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 their different buying options.
MOTORS has the most Facebook Likes (213,600), while cinch has the most Instagram followers (32,000). It’s important that UK car buying companies also monitor their total engagement rate; MOTORS saw the highest total engagement rate of all companies (6,124).
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, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. All car-buying companies need to ensure their website is accessible for all customers looking to buy (or sell) vehicles.
In our previous report, cinch flagged the most accessibility alerts (46). This quarter, continues to report 46 accessibility alerts. This car buying company can reduce accessibility alerts by improving keyboard navigation, e.g., making sure all buttons, links and forms are keyboard accessible.
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.