The Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK leasing brokers has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK leasing brokers perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK leasing brokers has just been published.  It covers the largest 12 national Leasing brokers, including Leasing.com, Select Car Leasing, All Car Leasing, Nationwide Vehicle Contracts, Leasing Options, First Vehicle Leasing, Hippo Leasing, Pink Car Leasing, Vanarama, LeaseCar, Synergy Car Leasing, and Intelligent Car Leasing.

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 leasing brokers to win brand exposure, accelerate online views, and increase leases driven from online activity. 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 Q3 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.  

What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each site 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. Visitors to leasing brokers' sites will want to find their options quickly and, therefore, a well-maintained site with minimal levels of technical errors is essential for providing a great customer experience.

In our last report for the leasing brokers sector, we noted that each broker was seeing generally low levels of website errors, with the presence of 4xx and 5xx error codes present in each site at a minimum. However, Leasing.com, which had seen 317 4xx errors previously, is still lagging behind in technical site compliance, currently returning 848 4xx errors in our crawls.

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. As with ensuring key pages are well signposted and accessible, leasing brokers must ensure that their sites are quick and well optimised for mobile, ensuring that customers are given a good impression of the broker's services at each touchpoint.

Mobile page speed scores for leasing brokers currently lie between 49, for Nationwide Vehicle Contracts, down to 17 for Hippo Leasing. Though no brokers are surpassing the 'okay' benchmark of 50, we have seen falls in mobile page speed performance across all sectors we specialise in.

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. Leasing brokers can look to engaging with a digital PR specialist to identify opportunities to gain backlinks from high-authority sites, along with increasing referral traffic.

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. DAs for leasing brokers range from 33 for Synergy Car Leasing, to 59 for Vanarama.

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 impacting consumers abilities to spend disposable income on treats and luxuries, we might expect interest in leasing brokers to fall, as automotive drivers may wish to opt for purchasing cheaper models outright, in order to avoid large monthly costs.

All twelve leasing brokers have seen falls in organic traffic year on year. The biggest fall has come from both First Vehicle Leasing and All Car Leasing, which both saw a drop of 67%. Select Car Leasing is the closest broker to maintaining its year on year traffic, seeing only a 25% drop.

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. 'Reviews' would be a great option for leasing brokers to build customer trust directly from the SERP, though well-optimsied content answering key questions about the leasing process will also see them rank well for 'FAQ' and 'people also ask' results.

'Reviews' are the most appeared-for result type in terms of volume, with Nationwide securing the most placements, with 13,800. However, the most widely-appeared for result type is 'images', with each of the twelve brokers maintaining a visual presence on the SERP. Select Car Leasing has scored the most 'image' appearances, with a total of 10,400.

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. Leasing brokers may want to consider high-intent search terms when optimising for longtail keywords, as these are most likely to gain conversions (even if traffic levels are low).

Though the First Vehicle Leasing site is outranking two competitors when it comes to total longtail keywords ranked, it sits in last place when it comes to appearances within the top three positions. First Vehicle Leasing has secured a reasonably high amount of appearances in positions 4-20, indiciating that optimisations for these currently-ranking terms can help improve appearances within the top three.

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 examples of Synergy Car Leasing's Facebook ads below. Though the ads and creative are clearly templated, allowing for quick reproduction for different models, Synergy will want to ensure this does not contribute to any 'ad blindness', as users may not notice the differences between vehicles.

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. Leasing brokers can tie the creation of shareable content into their strategy for digital PR, and look to topics across to automotive space rather than focus on leasing-specific content.

We saw in our research that Leasing.com and All Car Leasing are leading on Facebook likes, with 116,000 and 104,000 respectively, while Select Car Leasing and Hippo Leasing have secured the largest audiences on Instagram, with 14,600 and 10,600. Building a large organic audience means a slightly reduced reliance on using paid media ads to improve brand awareness and visibility, and ensures a readily-engaged audience is available to see your brand's content.

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. Though the automotive sector may not feel accessibility for partially sighted users is a priority, drivers with colour vision deficiencies (who will still be able to drive) must be considered in website design.

All twelve leasing brokers are struggling with accessibility to some degree. First Vehicle Leasing currently has the biggest cause for concern, with 283 alerts present in our audits. These are mainly down to redundant title text, which can cause barriers for users utilising screen readers to access the site, though contrast errors are also a prevalent barrier on the site.

Q3 2023 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

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

GET THE FULL 79-PAGE Q3 2023 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 Koons Automotive on Unsplash