The Q2 2024 benchmarking report for UK sleep brands has just been published. Learn how the top 10 UK sleep brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q2 2024 benchmarking report for UK sleep brands has just been published. It covers the largest 10 national sleep brands, including Silent Night, Tempur, Sleepeezee, Emma, OTTY, Dormeo, Simba, Vispring, Eve, and Hypnos.
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 sleep brands to win brand exposure, generate online orders, and drive in-store recognition (where relevant). 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 Q2 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 10 sleep brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK sleep brands or request a copy of the report for the full review.
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 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.
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. Sleep brands will want to keep on top of changing stock lines in order to ensure customers can easily find the product that suits their specific needs.
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. With many sleep brands' products looking similar, they will be keen to ensure their items stand out with high-quality lifestyle images, and graphics & videos talking through their products' benefits. However, assets like this can easily bring down site speed performance, if not properly optimised.
For Q2 2024, the mobile site speed ranged between 60 and 7, with 9 of the 10 brands reporting a score below the recommended 50%. A fast website can make customer happier and less irritated, making them more likely to make a purchase. If a website takes forever to load (longer than the recommend 3 seconds), they’re less likely to continue browsing the website. The sleep brand with the lowest mobile site speed is Eve. It should look to reduce the size of its images to help with this score moving forwards.
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. Sleep brands can look to build domain authority by collaborating with publications and bloggers within their niche. Spotting opportunities for evergreen content, that can be publicised more heavily around events such as 'national sleep day', helps create long-lasting links that will stay relevant all year round.
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. The DA for this quarter ranged between 74 and 37, with Sleepeezee reporting the lowest score. This sleep brand should focus on delivering content on its blog page that high-authoritative websites will want to direct backlinks to. While Sleepeezee didn’t receive the lowest number of backlinks, these backlinks were from few domains — lower than the recommended 10%.
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. Typically, most brands in non-essential sectors are seeing falls in traffic year on year, and potential customers are likely to delay big purchases, like mattresses and beds, unless absolutely necessary.
Eve reported the lowest organic traffic for both mobile (-41%) and desktop (-22%). To help increase its organic traffic, this sleep brand should take steps to increase its mobile site speed (given that it reported the lowest of all brands) to encourage consumers to visit its website from a mobile to increase sales.
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. For sleep brands, making good use of the 'reviews' universal search result will allow them to build trust in customers directly from the SERP.
Silent Night continues to stay at the top of the leaderboard for the most Universal Search results (31,764), with the majority of these appearances coming from ‘reviews’. However, 5 of the 10 sleep brands reported zero results for ‘reviews’, and they should reach out to past customers to help increase this figure to rank in SERPs.
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. Sleep brands should be looking to include high conversion-potential longtail keywords in their strategy, such as 'memory foam king mattress next day delivery', as these indicate users looking for products with immediate availability.
All sleep brands saw more longtail keyword appearances on mobile than desktop, with Silent Night remaining at the top of the leaderboard. Vispring flagged the fewest longtail keyword appearances and should assess the phrases it uses to ensure it’s incorporating relevant keywords for its target audience.
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 provide an opportunity for sleep brands to quickly reach audiences with offers, new lines, and key products they’re looking to push.
We’ve included 3 examples of Dormeo’s sponsored Facebook posts. This sleep brand should reduce the number of lines of content, as users on social media want snappy content they can read at a glance — otherwise, they’ll scroll straight past.
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. For sleep brands, they can look to create content that is topical for seasonal events but can remain relevant all year round, such as cooling mattress technology that can work alongside both summer and winter duvets for optimal comfort.
The majority of the brands favoured Facebook, and Tempur has the largest Facebook page (406,100 Likes).
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. With blue often being a favoured brand colour for sleep brands, they must ensure that contrast is sufficient enough to make their content readable.
OTTY reported the most accessibility alerts (66), with the majority of these due to redundant links. It’s important that brands lead consumers to the right links to prevent distrust and frustration. Silent Night is at a close second with 62 accessibility alerts.
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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