The Q3 2022 benchmarking report for UK fragrance brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK fragrance brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2022 benchmarking report for UK Fragrance brands has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national fragrance brands, including The Fragrance Shop, Fragrance Direct, Les Senteurs, All Beauty, Beauty Base, Notino, Perfume Direct, Look Fantastic, Cult Beauty, The Perfume Shop, Perfume Click and Feel Unique – now Sephora UK as of October 17^th 2022. 

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest marketing share online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for fragrance brands to win brand exposure, drive enquiries and orders. The report highlights quick wins that will improve the performance 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 take-aways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call. 

What The Industry Research Report Covers

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.  

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 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.

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.

Whilst most of the fragrance brands had fairly low website errors, almost all the brands had some 4xx errors. The Perfume Shop saw the most error codes on their sites, with 226 4xx error codes. The Perfume Shop must ensure their sites don’t lead their users to dead ends, this could lead potential customers to using other sites out of frustration.

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.

We would expect most to achieve at least an ‘okay’ score of 50-89, whereas none of the twelve fragrance brands did. The mobile page speed scores are currently between 5 and 44, with none of the fragrance brands hitting even an ‘okay’ score. All twelve fragrance brands have some serious work to do on improving their mobile page speed.

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 gage of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads.

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. Ten of the twelve companies achieved a score of average or above, with Beauty Base being the lowest scoring brand, hitting only 34. Those at the lower end of the scale need to be focusing on building a stronger backlink profile to compete with the higher scoring brands.

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.

We looked at how all twelve fragrance brands have performed compared to last year. Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. We found that only three of the twelve fragrance brands have achieved year on year growth in mobile traffic. Beauty Base are leading the way with a 35% increase. Whilst Cult Beauty have suffered the worst YOY loss with a 67% decrease.

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.

We could see that reviews were the highest used universal search feature, with Look Fantastic reaching 53,300 results. Most of the companies are achieving great results with all the universal search feature options, however some companies are underusing them. Those getting a small amount of results need to work towards the numbers their competitors are achieving.

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.

Though Les Senteurs are ranking for 1,341 longtail keywords overall, most of these are ranking outside the top 20, with none appearing in the top ten positions. Les Senteurs should be looking at how to improve their rankings on existing longtail keywords, but also at how they can expand their strategy to include new specific search terms. 

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) forecast to hit over 42 million users by 2022, 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.

Below, we can see examples of Look Fantastic’s Facebook ads. The use of images of a range of different products is a great way to capture a diverse range of customers attention, along with having the deals visible and eye catching on the images themselves. 

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.

With fragrance brands offering a range of different fragrance options, there should be a wide variety of content opportunities for these brands to jump on. However, while some of these brands are showing a consistent content output, Beauty Base and The Fragrance Shop are lagging behind when it comes to content production when compared to their competitors. This is a missed opportunity for these brands, who could be sharing content, getting involved in the social media crazes, and sharing information about special offers. 

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.

Most of the fragrance brands appear to be struggling with accessibility within their sites, with higher errors across the board than we typically see. Notino are seeing a huge 370 alerts on their websites. All twelve fragrance brands should always be reviewing and optimising their accessibility, however those seeing high numbers of errors and alerts need to investigate what the issues within their websites are.    

Q3 2022 Winners Leaderboard

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

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q3 2022 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.