The Q3 2024 benchmarking report for UK car buying companies has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK car buying companies perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2024 benchmarking report for UK car buying companies has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national car buying companies, including Big Motoring World, Cargiant, CarSupermarket.com, Motorpoint, Carcraft, Cazoo, 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 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.

Q3 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 car buying companies on, check out our quick-look table below; Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK car buying companies or request a copy of the report for the full review.

Request the report

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 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.

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.  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 reported 27 4xx errors — the highest of all UK car buying companies brands — and it should assess for any broken links to ensure it’s not directing customers to a dead end, potentially causing frustration, which could lead them to leave its site.

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. 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, Cargiant flagged the slowest mobile site speed. This quarter, Cargiant remains at the bottom of the leaderboard (15% — a decrease from 20% in the previous quarter). Adopting lazy loading will help to increase this speed and prevent users from becoming frustrated.

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 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 for this quarter ranged between 70 and 26, with Carcraft reporting the lowest DA. This UK car buying company saw the fewest backlinks and should focus on creating high-quality content that other websites with a similar target audience will want to backlink to.

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. 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 of the companies saw a decrease in organic mobile traffic, with Cazoo reporting a -38% loss. Two companies saw a decrease in organic desktop traffic, with Cazoo also reporting the biggest loss there (-29%).

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 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 saw the most Universal Search appearances (124,830), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’. On the other hand, Carcraft flagged the least overall Universal Search appearances (601) and should focus on optimising images to help increase this figure.

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 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 report the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (32,368) and 45,702 for positions 4–10. It’s important that companies track their longtail keyword strategy to ensure customers are using their keyphrases in search engines.

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.

We’ve included 3 examples of CarSupermarket.com sponsored Facebook posts. This UK car buying company included a question in each post to help increase engagement rates and encourage its followers to interact with its content.

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 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 remains at the top spot for the total engagement (4,060) and Facebook Likes (195,600). Cinch continues to have the largest Instagram account (29,800 followers).

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, 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 audit, Perrys Motor Sales flagged 49 accessibility alerts, which it's decreased to 42 this quarter. Cinch has the most accessibility alerts (44), with 13 of these due to underlined text and 13 caused by noscript element.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q3 2024 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 Mike Movassaghi.

Photo by why kei on Unsplash