UK Online Grocery Growth Intelligence

The question

How can UK online grocery retailers improve digital growth through website experience, paid advertising and experimentation? Tesco's site could not be reliably tested because of an access restriction, so the comparisons were chosen to protect research integrity rather than manufacture missing numbers.

What I did

• Collected ten mobile Lighthouse observations across Ocado and Sainsbury's grocery pages, and manually analysed ten Ocado and Tesco Meta adverts verified in the Meta Ad Library.
• Compared website performance, Ocado versus Sainsbury's, and paid social creative strategy, Ocado versus Tesco, across two shopping missions: weekly groceries and dinner tonight.
• Built four Tableau Public dashboard components and scored ten proposed growth experiments with ICE.
• Turned the signals into a 90-day growth roadmap, kept to proposals rather than claimed results.

What I found

• Ocado's audited pages averaged a mobile performance score of 33.8 against Sainsbury's 49.8, with Ocado's category page the slowest at an LCP of 31.5 seconds.
• The two brands lean different ways in paid social: Ocado's sample pushed value, discounts and delivery, while Tesco's leaned on premium quality, recipe inspiration and Clubcard loyalty.
• The strongest opportunity was improving Ocado's category-page experience, the highest-ranked experiment at an ICE score of 7.33 out of 10.