The Q4 2022 benchmarking report for UK high street fashion brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK high street fashion brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q4 2022 benchmarking report for UK high street fashion brands has just been published.  It covers the largest 12 national high street fashion brands, including Monsoon, River Island, Superdry, Oasis, White Stuff, H&M, New Look, Matalan, Next, Zara, Fat Face and Joules.  

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 fashion brands to win brand exposure locally, online and in-store footfall. 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 take-aways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

You can also find out how these 12 high street fashion brands performed against last quarter, by revisiting our Q3 report round-up. 

As you have likely seen, Joules went into administration at the end of 2022. Next has since bought 74% of the company (with 26% still being owned by Tom Joule, the founder of Joules) and the site is still running under the name Joules. It seems unlikely at the moment that it would move to a redirect in the future, as we have seen Next do with Made.com, with the split of ownership. 

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 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.

Many of the UK high street fashion brands have varying degrees of technical errors that will be hindering organic traffic and conversion performance. An example here is Joules’ abnormally high 2,656 4XX errors, this is the highest of all the high street fashion brands. We saw a similar number of errors in Q3 from Joules. All companies seeing errors need to continue looking into the causes, as these will be making their site difficult to navigate and frustrating to use. This is likely to also give a negative impression of the brand to the user, who need to trust them to provide an excellent level of service.

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’ve seen great improvement since Q3, with three of the twelve high street fashion brands now scoring within an ‘okay’ range of 50-89, with scores ranging from 8-78. All twelve brands need to be looking at how they can increase their scores.

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. In Q4 we saw the DA range from 87 to 62. We can see that all twelve brands have an excellent DA, however, those at the lower end should continue trying to improve to compete with the highest scorers.

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 high street fashion brands have performed compared to last year. Continuous improvement and optimisation is also needed to secure traffic year on year. We can see that ten of the twelve brands have lost traffic compared to last year. FatFace saw the biggest gain of 3%, whilst Joules saw the biggest drop of 44%.

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.

We could see that Image Pack was the highest used universal search feature, with Next taking the top spot reaching 144,200 results. Some companies are underusing most universal search feature options and only seeing a handful of results. Those getting a small number 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 retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index.

Oasis are still ranking for a much smaller amount of longtail keywords in the top 1-3 spots when compared with some of their competitors. They should be looking at how to improve their ranking 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 Fat Face’s Facebook ads. Using a mix of clothing/accessories ranges, along with the clear CTA’s, makes the advert eye-catching to scrolling social media users. 

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.

We saw in our research that many of the high street fashion brands are falling behind on content creation. Superdry and Oasis have been sharing very little content over most of 2022 compared to their competitors. For high street fashion brands with different products, styles and deals, they could all definitely find more content to share on their social platforms.

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 of the high street fashion brands appear to be struggling with accessibility within their sites, with all twelve seeing an array of errors, contrast errors and alerts. Joules are seeing the highest number of alerts, hitting 946. Joules should look into the causes of these. We would expect all the high street fashion brands that are seeing accessibility issues to be reviewing and optimising their accessibility.

Q4 2022 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

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

To see the Q3 report and leaderboard, click here.  

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q4 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.

Photo by Viktor Bystrov on Unsplash