The Q3 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 Q3 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 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.

Q3 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. UK wine delivery suppliers need to ensure that their website’s theme is suitable for both desktop and mobile, they include optimised images to help with site speed, and they include valuable details about the flavours of their products, along with any details that will help to increase interest in their products.

Yapp Brothers reported 167 4xx errors. It’s important that brands regularly assess their linking structure to ensure they’re not directing consumers to a dead end, which can lead to frustration. This UK wine delivery service can reduce its 4xx errors by include redirect links for any pages that are no longer available.

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 a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, consumers are more likely to grow impatient and leave their website — potentially resorting to a competitor website. Suppliers should focus on adopting a mobile-friendly theme to improve download speeds for users on a mobile and aim to reduce their page weight to minimise site speed times.

The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 49 and 6, with no suppliers scoring above the recommend 50% for this category. However, the supplier to watch is Adnams, which reported the slowest site speed. Upon closer inspection, this UK wine delivery supplier should reduce image sizes, as larger images can affect a site’s 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 is not gained through sponsored ads. UK wine delivery suppliers should focus on creating shareable content that other websites will want to direct their audience to, ensuring they’re connecting with websites that have a similar target audience to expand their reach.

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 for this quarter ranged between 71 and 31, with SWIG reporting the lowest DA score. This supplier also flagged the fewest backlinks, and it should adopt a PR strategy to engage with websites that have a similar target audience.

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. UK wine delivery suppliers have an opportunity to gain organic traffic by using an effective keyword strategy and assessing this regularly. Suppliers should also take into account the data of mobile vs desktop so they can make improvements to their website theme based on the consumers’ device.

Only SWIG reported a decrease in organic traffic, which was for desktop. Otherwise, every other UK wine delivery supplier saw an increase in organic traffic for both desktop and mobile. Most significantly, Slurp saw a 171% increase for desktop and a 457% increase for mobile, which could be due to a change of URL.

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, and a site can appear for Universal Search results without being strong in standard rankings. UK wine delivery suppliers will want to ensure they have a strong performance for 'reviews' and ‘images’ by encouraging past customers to leave a comment online about their brand and optimising images.

Majestic Wine secured the most Universal Search appearances (21,692), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ (12,300). On the other hand, SWIG reported the fewest Universal Search appearances (207), and it should focus on optimising images (adding meta descriptions and alt information).

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. UK wine delivery suppliers can optimise towards high purchase-intent phrases, such as ‘wine subscription service', ‘wine gift set’, or even specific brands.

Majestic Wine secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (3,534) and positions 4–10 (3,781). While Tanners Wines is further down the scoreboard for position 3, this supplier reported 731 appearances for position 4–10 — which is an effective way for brands to increase their position in SERPs.

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.

We’ve included examples of Naked Wine’s sponsored Facebook posts. This supplier included vertical videos to cater to consumers using a mobile, and it also incorporated emojis to make its posts visually more striking to attract people’s attention.

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. UK wine delivery suppliers can create shareable social content that isn’t just focused on the brand to build a relationship with its online community.

Naked Wine has the largest Facebook page (271,100 Likes) and the largest Instagram account (50,300 followers). However, SWIG reported the highest total engagement (161,881) — an important category for brands to assess their followers are interacting with their 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, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Brands should focus on reducing accessibility alerts, errors, and contrast errors to improve readability for those using a screen reader.

Tanners Wines flagged 571 accessibility alerts, with the majority of these due to redundant title text. It should modify titles so they’re more descriptive and an accurate representation of the content.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q3 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.

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