The Q4 2022 benchmarking report for UK high street beauty has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK high street beauty perform across the digital space.
The latest Q4 2024 benchmarking report for UK High street beauty has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national high street beauty, including Rimmel, Revolution, E.L.F. Wet n Wild, Morphe, Physicians Formula, NYX, Revlon, Max Factor, Milani, Barry M and Maybelline New York.
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 high street beauty brands to win brand exposure locally, along with online orders and in-store footfall. The report highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons across 20+ online performance metrics and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for high street beauty brands to win brand exposure, online growth and sales.
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.
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.
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.
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 high street beauty brands had fairly low levels of website errors, we noted that five of the brands had abnormally high 4xx errors. Wet and Wild scored the highest, hitting 2,839 4xx error codes on their site, something we very rarely see. All the brands seeing errors must ensure their sites don’t lead their users to dead ends, this could lead potential customers to using other sites out of frustration.
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.
The results we found in our research were especially disappointing. For such huge companies, we would expect most to achieve at least an ‘okay’ score of 50-89, whereas only two of the twelve high street beauty brands did. The mobile page speed scores are currently between 17 and 53, with even the higher end of the scale being much less than we would expect to see. All twelve brands have some serious work to do on improving their mobile page speed.
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. Eleven out of the twelve high street beauty brands achieved average and above, with only Milani being out of this range with a low score of 13. Milani need to be focusing on building a stronger backlink profile to compete with their higher-scoring rivals.
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 high street beauty brands have performed compared to last year. Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. We found that eleven of the high street beauty companies have failed to achieve year on year growth in mobile traffic. Only three brands saw a year on year growth, with Revolution seeing an amazing 132% increase. Whilst Physicians Formula saw the biggest loss of 62%. All brands seeing a loss need to be looking into the reasons behind these dramatic drops in mobile traffic.
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 E.L.F. reaching 2,400 results. However, with all the universal search feature options, all twelve are underusing them, with most of the result hitting the hundreds rather than the thousands. With such large brands we would expect to see much higher results.
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.
Although some of the brands are using a high number of longtail keywords, most of these aren’t within the top 20 ranking longtail keywords. Some brands, such as Revolution and Revlon aren’t using anywhere near as many longtail keywords as their competitors. To compete with those top companies, most of the high street brands need to expand their strategy to include new specific search terms along with improving their existing longtail keywords.
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 NYX’s Facebook ads. The use of real customer videos and images are extremely popular at the moment, as most people enjoy seeing how it could really look on them rather than in studio lighting with a makeup artist. With platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels becoming rapidly more popular, NYX are utilising the popular video format.
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 high street beauty brands offering a huge range of products, there is a massive opportunity for content creation. From jumping on social media crazes, to sharing how-tos and special offers, there is a huge range of content these brands can be sharing. Many of the twelve brands are falling behind in content creation, there is enormous room for improvement from all twelve high street beauty brands.
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.
Though most of the high street beauty brands appear to have reasonably accessible sites, with fewer errors than we typically see, some are hitting higher numbers than expected. E.L.F are seeing 240 alerts, which is a great improvement compared to the 536 alerts we saw on their website in Q3. All twelve high street beauty 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.
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 Raphael Lovaski on Unsplash