The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK tyres and servicing brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK tyres and servicing brands perform across the digital space.
The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK tyre and servicing brands has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national tyre and servicing brands, including ATS Euromaster, Tyre Shopper, Kwik-Fit, Formula One Autocentres, blackcircles.com, BookMyGarage, WhoCanFixMyCar, Asda Tyres, Mr Clutch Autocentres, Halfords, National Tyre & Autocare, and Protyre.
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 tyre and servicing brands to win brand exposure locally, drive online views, and encourage either online purchases or visits to branches. 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 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.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics we evaluated these top 12 tyres and servicing brands on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing tyre and servicing brands, or request a copy of the report for the full review.
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.
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.
Pay-Per-Click marketing is constantly evolving, with more and more advertisers being forced to hand over a lot of control to Google's algorithms as the push for automation grows ever stronger. There are still key elements of control that we have though, the main one of these being budget which is ultimately something the algorithms can't take from you. That's why being smart with your budget and ad coverage is essential to achieving strong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.
For Q1 2025, the average budget wastage across these UK tyres and servicing brands was £10,197, with some of the top players in the market spending a considerable amount on areas and audiences unlikely to deliver a return. We can see this in more detail when looking at the average monthly cost per cost-per-click (CPC) amongst advertisers, with the average of this metric being £16.25 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively.
There are varying monthly ad budgets across the competitors in the report. While this gap highlights the competitive advantage that larger budgets can provide, it's not just about spending more; it’s about spending smarter. By focusing on driving efficiency in campaign management, targeting, and budget allocation, businesses with smaller budgets can still effectively compete with larger players. Investing in data-driven strategies and refining ad performance can help close the gap and maximise the return on every pound spent, enabling growth even in a competitive landscape. Relative to their spend, ATS Euromaster has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £3, and Protyre has the highest at £76.
The report highlights the importance of budget efficiency by comparing monthly ad spend with estimated CPC in relation to your competitors, see who has the highest and lowest CPC. To maximise the effectiveness of your budget, it’s essential to focus on driving CPC down while maintaining or improving campaign performance. In this report, Protyre has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £259,000, and ATS Euromaster has the lowest at £1,760.
By optimising targeting, refining ad copy, and leveraging data to identify high-converting opportunities, you can ensure every click delivers maximum value. This approach not only stretches your budget further but also boosts your return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling you to achieve stronger results without simply increasing expenditure.
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. For tyres and servicing brands, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for drivers needing to locate local retail and garage options for their vehicles and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages such as branch locators, or for key product lines.
BookMyGarage reported the highest 4xx errors (2,496). 4xx errors can frustrate and confuse visitors, and frequent errors can encourage them to leave the website. With a plethora of 4xx errors, this can communicate that the website is poorly maintained or unreliable to search engines.
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 your site is technically compliant, tyre and servicing brands must ensure their site experience is fast and efficient so users don't turn elsewhere.
This quarter, the mobile site speed ranged between 76 and 25, with BookMyGarage flagging the lowest site speed. There are many ways a brand can increase their mobile site speed, such as minimising redirects and, most importantly, ensuring their website has a mobile-friendly theme, such as a simple interface and navigation system. There are also tools available to monitor and increase mobile site speed efficiently.
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. Tyre and servicing brands can look to producing content and PR campaigns across the full spectrum of automotive ownership, and should be able to secure backlinks from a range of sector-specific and regional press publications.
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 score for this quarter ranged between 76 and 40, with ASDA Tyres flagging the lowest DA. There are several ways a brand can increase their domain authority, but focusing on uploading quality content that resonates with their target audience is the most sure way to increase their domain authority. Other steps can help, such as keyword placement, improving their internal linking strategy and using adequate meta descriptions, title tags and header tags across their website.
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. Many retail brands are seeing sector-wide falls in organic traffic. Though tyre and servicing brands should be an ever-essential product for any automotive owner, brands may find car owners are updating their tyres and opting for servicing less frequently, resulting in less overall traffic to the sector.
Six of the brands reported a decline in organic traffic on desktop, while 9 saw a decline on mobile. A mobile-friendly website theme will help to encourage visitors to access a brand’s website from a mobile. A responsive theme ensures that the website works across multiple devices, and compressing images and incorporating lazy loading will help to optimise the website.
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 site can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Local pack' results could prove particularly useful to tyre and servicing brands, helping them appear for 'near me' searches and capture potential customers looking for nearby branches.
Halfords secured the most overall Universal Search appearances (176,398) the majority of these came from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’. Universal Search appearances can benefit a brand greatly, so it’s important that all brands take steps to increase their overall appearances. Universal Search appearances can enhance brand authority, for example, as appearing in knowledge panels or featured snippets positions a brand as a trusted authority in a particular niche.
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. Tyre and servicing brands should consider their chances of ranking for key, transactional-focussed keywords and phrases, which might include availability, location, and models of vehicles.
Halfords secured the most overall Universal Search appearances (176,398) the majority of these came from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’. Universal Search appearances can benefit a brand greatly, so it’s important that all brands take steps to increase their overall appearances. Universal Search appearances can enhance brand authority, for example, as appearing in knowledge panels or featured snippets positions a brand as a trusted authority in a particular niche.
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 can be useful for both national and local garage reach.
We’ve included examples of ASDA Tyres’s sponsored posts. This UK tyres and servicing brand included a maximum of 2 lines of text, helping to catch social media users’ attention while they’re scrolling.
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. Tyre and servicing brands which are working to improve their DAs and longtail keyword performance will find they naturally build up a good stock of shareable content, particularly if they use appealing images and stats that can be shared on social media.
ASDA Tyres has the most Facebook Likes (2.1 million) and the most Instagram followers (604,900). All brands should analyse their social media following and activity to spot and areas for improvements and to see what’s working. Social media is also a great opportunity for brands to build a connection with their target audience, so they should consider responding to comments, which will also enhance their social media engagement rate.
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. All brands should be considering accessibility within their website design, even in sectors such as automotive, where the need may not be as readily apparent.
In our previous audit, Halfords received the highest accessibility alerts (156). This quarter, Halfords is still the brand to watch, and they’re dramatically increase their accessibility alerts to 1,481. There are many ways this brand can improve their accessibility alerts, such as making content more readable (considering readability score) and providing alt information for images.
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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