The Q4 2024 benchmarking report for home brands & accessories has has just been published. Learn how the top home brands & accessories perform across the digital space.
The latest Q4 2024 benchmarking report for home brands & accessories has just been published. It covers the largest 10 home brands & accessories, including Graham and Green, AMARA, Anthropologie, Cuckooland.com, Oliver Bonas, Cox & Cox, Pooky Lights, Rockett St George, Olivia's, and Graham & Brown.
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 home brands to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and generate sales. 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 winning 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. 
Q4 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 10 home brands on, check out our quick-look table below; 
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing UK home brands, or request a copy of the report for the full review.
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. These home brands will want to ensure prospective customers can easily access key pages, such as product information and specifications, pricing, and product updates.
Graham & Brown flagged 473 4xx errors — the highest of all brands. Updating internal and external links will reduce this figure, helping to make its website more user-friendly.
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. For home brands & accessories, they'll want to provide an excellent customer experience at every touchpoint, giving the impression of quick service from the moment a user steps virtual foot on their site.
In our previous report, no brands scored at least 50% — the recommended site speed score all brands should aim for. This quarter, 2 brands scored above 50% — Oliver Bonas received the fastest score of 58%. However, the brand to watch is Cox & Cox, which saw a 28% mobile site speed. Incorporating lazy loading will help to increase its mobile site speed score and make its website more responsive for users.
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. Home brands & accessories should create relationships with brands with a similar audience to adopt guest blogging in the hopes of increase the number of backlinks to their website.
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 rating for this quarter ranged between 84 and 47, with Olivia's flagging the lowest DA. This brand can improve its DA score by writing guest posts on other websites and mainly focusing on uploading content that other websites will want to share.
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. With the cost-of-living crisis, it’s to be expected that brands will see a decrease in organic traffic due to consumers limiting the amount of money they spend on non-essential items.
Two brands reported a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, and 6 reported a decrease in organic traffic on mobile. However, Rockett St George received the biggest increase of organic traffic on mobile devices (+98% on desktop and +92% 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. Given that these home brands are in the retail industry, it’s to be expected that ‘images’ will be the most popular category for Universal Search results, and brands should ensure that images are properly sized and accurately and appropriately referenced through alt descriptions and captions.
Oliver Bonas continues to secure the most Universal Search appearances (154,995), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’.
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.
Oliver Bonas continues to report the most longtail keyword appearances (3,567 for position 3 and 10,664 for positions 4–10). It’s essential that all brands regularly assess their keyword strategy to ensure they’re using phrases that their target audience type into search engines. Otherwise, they’re missing an opportunity to grow their organic traffic.
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. Facebook ads are an effective way for UK home brands & accessories to share their latest releases and deals and expand their reach.
We’ve included examples of Graham & Brown’s sponsored posts. This brand included a carousel on one post, which is a great way to showcase more than one product on a single post.
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. Home brands & accessories should focus on assessing the total engagement rate and not just focus on the number of followers, as assessing this category allows brands to see if their online followers are interested in their content.
Graham & Brown has the largest Facebook page (460,800 Likes), while Anthropologie has the largest Instagram account (626,100). However, it’s AMARA that secured the highest total engagement (19,223).
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. Any home brand must be particularly conscious of accessibility, from both a branding and potential customer perspective.
In our previous report, Olivia’s flagged 621 accessibility alerts, which it’s reduced to 165 this quarter — a huge improvement in a short amount of time. Now, Cox & Cox is the brand to watch with 254 accessibility alerts, closely followed by Rockett St George with 247 accessibility alerts.
GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q4 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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