The Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK wine delivery brands has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK wine delivery brands perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2024 benchmarking report for UK wine delivery brands has just been published. It covers the largest 12 UK wine delivery brands, including Laithwaites Wine, Adnams, Slurp, Yapp Brothers, The Wine Society, Tanners Wines, Berry Bros. & Rudd, House of Townend, Lea & Sandeman Wine Merchants, SWIG, Naked Wines, and Majestic Wine.

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 wine delivery brands to win brand exposure, drive online views, and increase recognition and purchases. 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.

Q1 2024 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

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

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing UK diamond dealers or request a copy of the report for the full review.

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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 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. For wine delivery brands, having an easy-to-navigate site is essential for consumers looking to make a new purchase, and particular care should be taken of the pathways to key pages, such as best-selling wines, alcohol categories, and any key feature pages that customers may need to access.

In our audit, SWIGG flagged for 1,700 4xx errors and Adnams had 831. These wine delivery brands should consider alternative products or ranges that they can redirect to when products are removed to prevent customers from switching to competitor brands.

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. When operating in a competitive market, wine delivery brands will need to ensure they're offering an exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint, including the speed of their site.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 57 and 7, with only Yapp Brothers scoring above 50% (a speed that’s considered ‘okay’). The sites falling below this score should compress all existing images on their sites to increase their mobile site speed.

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. Wine delivery brands should be continually pushing to improve their domain authority and can achieve this with a strategic approach to digital PR and outreach.

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 was between 71 and 34, with SWIG at the bottom end of the leaderboard. Yapp Brothers and House of Townend also flagged below 40 — a benchmark all brand should be aiming for. All three brands should increase their backlinks from high-authoritative websites and follow an SEO strategy for all on-site SEO content.

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. Wine delivery brands, who are less likely to see consumers make 'impulse purchases', must ensure that they are optimising for keywords across the full range of awareness, consideration, and conversion terms to capitalise on traffic at each of these stages.

Only 2 out of the 12 wine delivery brands encountered an increase in mobile traffic compared to the previous year. Slurp received the biggest traffic increase at 57%, while Lea & Sandeman Wine Merchants had the biggest loss with a 44% decrease.

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 wine delivery brands, 'reviews' and the ‘image’ category are an excellent way to increase visibility through universal search and will help brands stand out against their competition with customer endorsements.

Majestic Wine saw the most appearances for overall Universal Searches, scoring most of these from ‘reviews’. On the other hand, SWIG has the least number of appearances in total and should adopt a strategy to increase its impressions for ‘reviews’ and the ‘image’ sector.

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. There are many longtail keyword options wine delivery brands could be optimising for, such as ‘dry white wine’, or specific wines, such as ‘2016 LES CARMES DE RIEUSSEC’.

Majestic Wine had the highest total appearances for longtail keywords and also scored the highest for the top three appearances, showcasing that it follows a successful keyword strategy. Meanwhile, Laithwaites Wine saw 688 appearances in the top three search engine results, outperforming The Wine Society (which had a higher ranking of the top 100 appearances). It’ll be interesting to see if The Wine Society optimises its keywords to rank higher.

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 a great way for wine delivery brands to reach people who are looking to try new, exciting drinks and increase brand awareness.

We’ve included three examples of Slurp’s Facebook posts. Each post includes one image that has been specifically designed to suit the brand’s aesthetics. The accompanied text is time-sensitive with offers and focuses solely on the brand’s products to help increase their online conversions.

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. Wine delivery brands can get creative with content and social media, by sharing new releases, images of their products in lifestyle settings, and news of any special offers or sales.

Ten of the 12 brands favour Facebook, and Naked Wines has the largest Facebook page and Instagram following. Surprisingly, Bros. & Rudd, House of Townend has the highest number of total engagement (13,454), despite having the fourth most largest Facebook page.

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, even subconsciously, brands lose customer interest as they turn to other wine delivery brands that can better meet their accessibility requirements.

In our audit, we found Bros. & Rudd, House of Townend flagged for 510 alerts, and Tanners Wines also had a high number of alerts (442). Both brands must address these factors to make their websites more accessible consumers. Additionally, SWIG raised some alarm bells with 113 contrast errors, and it must amend its font colour to make information easier to read for those with a colour vision deficiency.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 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.

Photo by Kelsey Knight on Unsplash