Go Outdoors leads outdoor retailers in online performance ranking

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Aug 21, 2018

Go Outdoors has taken the top spot in a ranking of outdoor retailers’ online performance, beating brands including Decathlon, Mountain Warehouse and Salomon.

The annual study, produced by digital marketing specialists Inside Online, ranks 48 of the leading websites within the outdoor retail sector according to their online performance.

The top five also included Decathlon, Mountain Warehouse, Salomon and Cotswold Outdoor.

But whilst Go Outdoors had the highest brand searches per month (673,000), its social media strategy showed it has room for improvement, with an owned social score of just 424.

In fact, Salomon was the only top-five brand to have a strong owned social score (2,504), which considers followers and engaged conversations on all major social media platforms.

When it comes to social media engagement and following, the brand with the highest score was Columbia, with Quechua, Salomon, Mammut and Sportpursuit making up the top five.

The report also considered the brands’ visibility, revealing Snow & Rock as the brand with the highest increase (21%) during the year. Go Outdoors, Cotswold and Mountain Warehouse have all seen a reduction in their previous years’ visibility as Towsure dropped out of the top ten, replaced by Absolute Snow. Meanwhile, Decathlon increased its visibility by 6%, moving to the top of the market.

“It’s been a mostly successful year for Outdoor Retailer brands concerning visibility. This digital landscape has a lot of competition for keyword search results with listings often coming from fashion retailers and department stores,” says Gemma Curtis, Inbound Content Marketer, at Inside Online.

“We loved Go Outdoors’ social channels which showed a variety of content including videos, news articles and product posts. They also post engaging content such as customer photos using hashtags and competitions which encourage users to comment, like and share.

“Brands should focus on creating content that invites a response is they want to improve their owned social scores.”