The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK chocolate suppliers has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK chocolate suppliers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK chocolate suppliers has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK chocolate suppliers, including Hotel Chocolat, Montezuma's Chocolates, Love Cocoa, GNAW Chocolate, Chococo, Prestat, Thorntons, Divine Chocolate UK, charbonnel et Walker, Cocoa Loco, PUMP STREET LIMITED, and Willie's Cacao.

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 UK chocolate suppliers to win brand exposure, drive traffic online, and increase both orders and the acquisition of new stock. 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.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 UK chocolate suppliers brands on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK chocolate suppliers or request a copy of the report for the full review.

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What The Industry Research Report Covers

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.  

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.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

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 chocolate suppliers was £2,118, 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 £13 . 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, Prestat reported the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £o, followed by Chococo at £4, and Love Cocoa has the highest at £72.

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, Divine Chocolate UK has the lowest estimate monthly ad spend at £39, and Hotel Chocolat has the highest at £126,000.

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.

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. UK chocolate suppliers will want to ensure customers can find information on products, including details about flavours and packages available, plus details needed for postage and order tracking.

Chococo reported 386 4xx errors — the highest of UK chocolate suppliers. This supplier should ensure their links are working so that they’re not directing visitors to a dead end, which can cause them to become frustrated with the website.

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. Chocolate suppliers should aim to deliver a smooth and easy web experience for their users, which means increasing mobile site speed and keeping page downloads to a maximum of 3 seconds to prevent them from leaving the website.

The mobile site speed ranged between 47 and 17, with Pump Street Ltd flagging the slowest mobile site speed. Fast-loading websites can improve user engagement and satisfaction, helping visitors to increase their trust in a brand.

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 is not gained through sponsored ads. UK chocolate suppliers should focus on creating shareable content that other websites will want to direct their audience to, which means focusing on topics that aren’t just specific to its brand.

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 73 and 32, with GNAW Chocolate reporting the lowest DA score. This chocolate supplier can increase their DA score by receiving backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites, which they can attract through outreach or by guest posting on their websites.

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. Non-essential items and treats are likely to see falls in consumer interest due to the cost of living crisis. Therefore, consumers are less likely to engage in luxury items, such as specialised chocolate, and may resort to supermarket options instead, which could affect these suppliers’ organic traffic.

Four of the chocolate suppliers reported a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, and 4 saw a decrease on mobile. Chococo is the supplier to watch, as they saw a 20% reduction on desktop and a 51% reduction on mobile. On the other hand, Pump Street Ltd saw the biggest increase on both desktop (80%) and mobile (41%).

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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. UK chocolate suppliers will want to ensure they have a strong performance for 'reviews' and ‘images’ so that potential customers feel they can trust the brand and are confident in what they’re purchasing.

Hotel Chocolat secured the most Universal Search Results overall (14,733), with the majority of these results coming from ‘images’ (7,800). It’s important that brands aim to secure Universal Search Results, as these can increase their exposure and results in higher engagement than regular links.

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 brand-new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Chocolate suppliers should develop a keyword strategy that includes phrases its target audience type into search engines, such as ‘organic dark chocolate’ or ‘artisan white chocolate’.

Hotel Chocolat continues to be the chocolate supplier to beat, with 2,861 appearances for position 3 and 4,475 appearances for positions 4–10. On the other hand, Prestat reported the fewest appearances for position 3 (7) and positions 4–10 (39).

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. Facebook ads are an opportunity to for chocolate suppliers to showcase their new product launches to previous customers and potentially reach new customers, too.

We’ve included screenshots of Thorntons’ sponsored Facebook posts. This UK chocolate supplier included vertical videos to cater for mobile users, which is a great strategy given that the majority of social media users access their profile from a mobile.

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 brand engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. UK chocolate suppliers can create shareable social content that isn’t just focused on the brand to build a relationship with its online community.

Hotel Chocolat has the most Facebook Likes (265,300) and the most Instagram followers (348,800). It’s important that brands also monitor their engagement rate, and Montezuma's Chocolates saw the highest engagement rate of all chocolate suppliers (4,083).

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. Sites which have large volumes of products, with different models that may only differ slightly in their specifications, must ensure that information is presented as clearly as possible, to improve accessibility. Chocolate suppliers will want to think about the impression they are conveying to customers needing additional accessibility, and ensure that key product details are made clear for everyone browsing the site.

In our previous audit, GNAW Chocolate was the supplier to watch, with 134 accessibility alerts. This quarter, GNAW Chocolate has reduced their accessibility alerts to 61, and the brand to currently watch is Prestat with 204 accessibility alerts.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 2025 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 Rory Tarplee

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