The Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK craft brewers has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK craft brewers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK craft brewers has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK craft brewers, including BrewDog, Beavertown Brewery, Siren Craft Brew, Magic Rock Brewing Co., The Wild Beer Co, Cloudwater Brew Co., Ltd, Verdant Brewing Co., Pressure Drop Brewing, Duration Brewing, Burnt Mill Brewery, Unity Brewing Co., and Mondo Brewing Company.

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 beer sellers 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 Q4 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q4 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 12 UK craft brewers, check out our quick-look table below:

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK live-in care providers 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.

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. Brands within the brewing space will be juggling huge volumes of products for a wide range of flavours and alcohol variations. 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. They'll particularly want to take care over key pages such as offers, new product launches, stock updates, and ensure that prospective customers can easily find key information.

Magic Rock Brewing flagged the most 4xx errors of all brands (130). It’s important that brands aim to reduce their 4xx errors to prevent consumers from becoming frustrated and potentially mistrusting the brand.

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. Brewing brands will want to ensure they have a fast-performing site that gives off an exceptional first impression to potential customers looking to buy from them or research more about their offerings.

The mobile site speed ranged between 96 and 57, with all brands scoring above the recommended 50%. A fast-loading website helps to retain web users, as they’re less likely to grow impatient with the website and leave.

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. For brands operating in the food and drink industry, they should be working with digital PR specialists to identify opportunities and ideas for out-of-the-box, surprising PR campaigns.

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 for this quarter ranged between 78 and 0.9, with Cloudwater Brew Co reporting the slowest score. This brewing brand also received the fewest number of backlinks, and increasing this score (such as by adopting a PR strategy), will help to improve its DA score.

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. The cost of living crisis and a drop in consumer confidence is having a wide impact across all non-essential sectors, as customers are cutting back on treats and expendable items. In the case of the food and drink industry, this could mean that customers are sticking to basics, rather than investing in alcohol, too.

Three of the brewing brands reported a decline in organic traffic on desktop, and five reported a decline in organic traffic on mobile. Unity Brewing Co saw the biggest loss (-36% on desktop and -100% on mobile).

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 brand can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. Beer sellers could look to ‘images’ and ‘reviews’ results, in order to build trust with potential customers and help educate them directly from the SERP.

BrewDog received the most Universal Search appearances (4,894), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’. Other brewing brands can improve their visibility in this category by ensuring all images are optimised with meta descriptions.

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. Beer sellers can look to their range of products for inspiration and guidance on longtail keyword strategy, including key terms such as ‘alcohol-free beer’ and ‘multipack IPA beer’ to make their website findable to prospective customers.

Beavertown Brewery reported the highest longtail keyword appearances (510 for position 3), while BrewDog reported the highest appearances for positions 4–10 (1,292). All brewing brands should regularly assess their keyword strategy to ensure their target audience relate with the phrases they’re inputting.

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. Beer sellers 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 Beavertown Brewery’s sponsored posts. This brewing brand incorporated vertical imagery to cater to uses on a mobile, and it also included 1–2 short lines of text to help with readability.

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. Generating informational content will help with longtail keyword performance (and ‘people also ask’ results), and beer sellers can look to include shareable content such as infographics to make on-site content engaging on social media.

Beavertown Brewery has the largest Facebook page (68,300 Likes) and the largest Instagram following (146,700). Upon closer inspection, this brewing brand posts time-relevant content with customised imagery that has a sense of humour.

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, brands lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere due to inaccessibility and frustration. Beer sellers should ensure their site is accessible for all.

Beavertown Brewery reported the most accessibility alerts (373), with the majority of these due to very small text. This brand should increase the font size to help with readability for all users, no matter the device they’re using.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q2 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.

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