Similarweb Momentum Awards 2016 UK Category Winners

Similarweb Momentum Awards 2016

The Similarweb Momentum Awards recognize websites in the UK that have demonstrated exceptional advancement in their online category in 2016.
Our 39 winners in 13 categories have successfully improved their Similarweb Ranking – an algorithmic score that sorts over 80 million sites by their total traffic and engagement metrics. (Scroll to the bottom for our methodology.)
Congratulations to all of our Momentum Awards winners!

Online Marketplaces

Amazon.de saw an upsurge in UK-based visitors after introducing an English-language version of its German domain. Visits to the site from the UK jumped by 111% with total pages per visit rising by 172%.
Additional sites that improved their Similarweb Ranking in the UK were ebay.com, johnlewis.com, and argos.co.uk.

Consumer Electronics

The domain webuy.com that is affiliated with the chain store CEX, won the UK market for this category. The site increased its pages per visit both on desktop and mobile web devices, increasing total pageviews by 25% from the previous year.
Other domains that showed significant improvement in this category were scan.co.uk and richersounds.com.

Apparel

First place Apparel category winner footlocker.co.uk, heavily invested in PPC campaigns at the time of its launch, having a positive impact on its direct traffic and overall brand presence. A similar use case was identified in aliexpress.com when in 2014, the site heavily invested in paid marketing campaigns, and its direct traffic also benefitted in the longer term.

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)

In 2016, tripadvisor.co.uk outperformed the industry benchmark for desktop engagement, with 10 pages per visit versus the industry average of eight pages per visit.
Shortly after the company announced its new content and advertising strategy offering more content advertising opportunities to destination marketing organizations (DMOs), its pages per visit improved by 118% in a single month.
Other OTAs worthy of mention are rome2rio.com, skyscanner.net, and lastminute.com.

Hotel Chains

Among the three winners, first place winner premierinn.com exhibited the highest share of organic search traffic, owing 48% of its desktop traffic to organic search.
In addition, premierinn.com and travelodge.co.uk showed significant investment in paid traffic in 2016, where each domain generated around 15% of their desktop traffic from paid search campaigns.

Hotel Booking Services

Trivago.com claimed first place in the Hotel Booking Services category with some notable wins in 2016: Mobile web traffic to trivago.com held steady at approximately 88% of the site’s total traffic, well above the industry benchmark of 57%. Additionally, trivago.com increased its mobile pageviews by 130% driving an increase in total pageviews of 220%.
Key players that also made their mark were trivago.co.uk, hoseasons.co.uk, and sykescottages.co.uk.

Airlines

First place winner ryanair.com not only leads as the top airline site in the UK but has also demonstrated the most improved Similarweb Ranking for its category.
Together with its increased visit duration, ryanair.com also saw an impressive increase in its pages per visit and a significant drop in bounce rate (from 45% to less than 25%).
Other Airline sites that improved their Similarweb Ranking last year were norwegian.com, britishairways.com, and emirates.com.
Take a deeper dive into our category insights:

Insurance

First place winner hastingsdirect.com took the category by exhibiting exceptional improvement in visitor engagement metrics. Pages per visit more than doubled to 14, well above the industry benchmark, and total pageviews increased by 180%.
Runners up in this category include aviva.co.uk, directline.com, lv.com, and axainsurance.com.

Banking

All three of the winning banks experienced a similar increase in traffic, ranging from 30-40%. In particular, tsb.co.uk exhibited a high share of mobile web traffic (56%), generating over 84M mobile visits in 2016.
Other noteworthy sites in this category include sainsburysbank.co.uk, co-operativebank.co.uk, and bankofscotland.co.uk.

Car Buying

First place winner carwow.co.uk displayed exceptional results across a number of performance indicators: Total web traffic increased by 138%, organic search traffic increased by 200%, direct traffic increased by 88%, and total pageviews improved by 152%.
Other Car Buying sites that enjoyed a jump in Similarweb Ranking were autotrader.co.uk, arnoldclark.com, and carandclassic.co.uk.

News & Media

Although sports.yahoo.com has a relatively low mobile web traffic share (40%) in 2016, it nonetheless succeeded to secure third place in the News and Media category. Its performance last year included a dramatic peak in traffic to its site during the 2016 Summer Olympics, reaching 12 million visits in August alone.
Two other noteworthy sites in news and media last year were liverpoolecho.co.uk and standard.co.uk.

Tech News

Third place winner trustedreviews.com also experienced SEO success, with organic search traffic increasing by 173% and an increase in direct traffic of 134%. Both of these traffic sources contributed to the site’s exceptional desktop traffic growth of 160% and greater brand awareness.
Additional Tech News sites that also displayed significant improvement in their Similarweb Ranking include gizmodo.com, gsmarena.com, and pcadvisor.co.uk.

Business News

In 2016, the three winning Business News sites generated over 264M visits of which the month of June (EU referendum) represented 11% of these visits. Of our winners, businessinsider.com was the only site that peaked in October rather than June with ~8.8M visits to its site.
Others business news sites that excelled in their Similarweb ranking were economist.com, wsj.com, and ibtimes.com.

Similarweb Momentum Awards 2016 – UK Winners List

Methodology
The Similarweb Momentum Awards recognize the websites in the UK that demonstrated exceptional advancement in their online category, based on the Similarweb Ranking. The Similarweb Ranking is an algorithmic score which sorts over 80 million global sites by their total traffic and engagement metrics.
Thirteen categories were reviewed this year: Online Marketplaces, Consumer Electronics, Apparel, Online Travel Agencies, Hotel Chains, Hotel Booking Services*, Airlines, Insurance, Banking, Car Buying, News & Media, Tech News, and Business News.

The winners were identified by conducting a year-over-year (2016 vs. 2015) analysis according to their change in Similarweb Ranking. The scoring methodology utilized was a weighted point system which gave preference to changes that happened closest to the top, i.e., a change in rank in the top 10 was scored higher than a change in rank in the lower 50. We considered only those companies whose final Similarweb Rank was within the top 100 sites in their category.
The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners were then identified in each category, resulting in 39 award winners in total for the UK.
*The scores for two domains: trivago.co.uk and trivago.com were merged and ranked as one domain entity.

Download the 2016 Similarweb Highlights Report

by Similarweb