The Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK sleep brands has just been published. Learn how the top 11 UK sleep brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q3 2023 benchmarking report for UK sleep brands has just been published. It covers the largest 11 national sleep brands, including Silent Night, Tempur, Sleepeezee, Emma, OTTY, Dormeo, Simba, Vispring, Sleep Beds, 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 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 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.  

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. 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.

As sleep brands have relatively smaller ranges, compared to e-commerce retailers in other sectors, there is less opportunity to make errors when it comes to technical compliance. In our last report, Silent Night returned 134 4xx errors in our crawls. In Q3, we can see that Silent Night has reduced this figure to 67, showing a marked improvement in technical compliance. 

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. 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.

We have seen universal falls in mobile page speed performance across all sectors that we specialise in. We're therefore unsurprised to see that only one brand, Tempur, has surpassed the 'okay' site speed benchmark of 50. Hypnos, which had seen its mobile page speed score half to 35 in our last report, is now showing a score of only 11. Hypnos must identify what is causing these continuous falls in mobile page speed in order to prevent any further decline in site experience.

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. 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. Sleep Beds have maintained their score of zero, as shown in our previous report - an unusual score for any established brand. Sleep Beds can look at backlink reclamation as an initial way of building their authority score quickly, before expanding to further activities.

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. 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.

Silent Night has continued to grow its digital footfall year on year, securing a 36% growth overall in Q3. The biggest fall in traffic was seen by Eve, which lost 55% of its organic traffic compared to 2022. With Silent Night's considerable gains in traffic, other sleep brands should ensure they're not losing ground to Silent Night on key, converting keywords while competing for a smaller customer pool.

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. For sleep brands, making good use of the 'reviews' universal search result will allow them to build trust in customers directly from the SERP.

While 'reviews' remain the most appeared-for Universal Search result overall, 'image' results are more widely seen, with all sleep brands making at least some appearances. Silent Night has achieved the most Universal Search appearances, for both 'reviews' and 'image' results.

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. 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.

Though Emma and Silent Night are still ranking for a comparable amount of longtail keywords overall, Silent Night remains a clear winner in terms of rankings within the top twenty positions, appearing in the top three for 1,280 keywords. Emma still has a broad range of keywords to focus optimisation efforts towards, indicating a high potential for improvement.

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 Simba's Facebook ads below. Simba has chosen vertical-aligned creatives in all three ads. the two video creatives will fit naturally within Facebook's 'reels' content, and therefore be more engaging for audiences. The use of a vertical alignment for static image ads ensures brands are capitalising on as much space as possible, enabling them to maximise the information being put across.

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. 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.

Meta remains the platform of choice for sleep brands, with Tempur retaining the highest volume of Facebook likes, with 408,400. Emma has the largest amount of Instagram followers, with a total of 49,700. Brands with large organic social followings will reduce their need to rely on paid advertising to promote organic 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. With blue often being a favoured brand colour for sleep brands, they must ensure that contrast is sufficient enough to make their content readable.

We have been making note of Simba's accessibility performance across our last three reports. While Simba has maintained the reduction in contrast errors they'd achieved in Q2, with this figure resting at 22, Simba has now returned the largest volume of alerts within our accessibility crawls, with a total of 102. Many of these alerts are due to very small text, indicating challenges for site visitors with poor vision.

Q3 2023 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 11 sleep brands 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 Gabriel Alenius on Unsplash