The Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK holiday parks has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK holiday parks perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK holiday parks has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national holiday parks, including Haven, Butlin’s, John Fowler, Hoburne Holidays, Pontins, Parkdean Resorts, Away Holidays, Park Holidays, Hoseasons, Break Free Holidays, Centre Parcs, and Forest Holidays.  

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 holiday parks to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and generate holiday bookings. 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 holiday parks to win brand exposure, online growth and sales.

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 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

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

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing UK holiday parks, 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 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 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. Holiday parks will want to ensure key information such as pricing and activities are clearly signposted, and that important content is not hidden behind broken links and 404 error codes.

In the last quarter, we reported that Break Free Holidays returned 959 4xx errors. In Q1 2024, this holiday park has reduced its 4xx errors to 65. John Fowler has the most 4xx errors, reporting 222. This holiday park must address any internal broken links to prevent customers becoming frustrated and exiting its 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. In a competitive field where prospective holiday goers will be looking to snap up deals quickly, having a fast-performing site is essential for holiday parks to generate bookings and provide a positive brand experience.

In the last quarter, we reported that Break Free Holidays returned 959 4xx errors. In Q1 2024, this holiday park has reduced its 4xx errors to 65. John Fowler has the most 4xx errors, reporting 222. This holiday park must address any internal broken links to prevent customers becoming frustrated and exiting its website.

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 isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Holiday parks could look to collaborate with and outreach to local & national publications, travel sites, and family bloggers to gain valuable backlinks from high-authority sites.

The DA rating for this quarter is between 72 and 30, with Break Free Holidays at the bottom of the leaderboard. This holiday park has the highest number of backlinks, so it doesn’t need to increase them (though it should look to adopt a PR strategy to focus on links from high-authoritative websites). Break Free Holidays should look to increase its site speed to help increase its DA rating.

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. As consumers are cutting back on treats and expendable items due to the cost of living crisis, you might expect general, overall traffic towards the holiday sector to have fallen year on year. However, with families potentially looking to UK breaks as a cost-effective alternative to holidays abroad, park brands who are capitalising on this change in consumer habits will see much stronger performance than competitors.

Seven of the 12 holiday parks encountered a loss in organic mobile traffic compared to the previous year. Pontins continues to see the biggest loss of 31% — a fall from its 26% in our previous audit.

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. 'Reviews', 'images', and 'local pack' results are all ways for holiday parks to gain trust, and share eye-catching content about their locations, directly from the SERP.

Hoseasons continues to score the most appearances for overall Universal Search results. This holiday park reported 88,600 appearances for ‘reviews’ — over double that of the runner-up’s results. However, this company scores the joint lowest for ‘knowledge panel’ and also has a low score for ‘featured snippet’, and it should look to expand its diversity to secure its number one spot.

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. Holiday parks should be looking to optimise for keywords with high purchase/booking intent, that indicate a user at the lower part of the conversion funnel.

Haven continues to hold the number one spot for the top 3 results. Hoseasons is position 3/12 for the top 3 results but has the top spot for positions 4–10, enabling it to have the opportunity to improve its ranking over the next few quarters.

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.

We’ve included 3 examples of Haven’s sponsored Facebook posts. All 3 posts include a vertical image to cater to mobile users, and the ‘book now’ CTA boxes can increase the chances of converting customers.  

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. Holiday parks can create content based on their activities, local area, or even to-do lists for families in the run-up to their break away.

We’ve included 3 examples of Haven’s sponsored Facebook posts. All 3 posts include a vertical image to cater to mobile users, and the ‘book now’ CTA boxes can increase the chances of converting customers.  

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. Holiday parks must be accessible for all, as poor accessibilty on-site may even indicate to a partially sighted user that the park itself may be unsuitable.

In our last audit, Pontins reported 90 contrast errors and has reduced this figure to 78 in this quarter. Forest Holidays returned 64 alerts in our previous report, which has slightly increased to 68 in Q1 2024. Upon closer inspection, Forest Holidays’ alerts are mainly due to noscript element and redundant alternative text,

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 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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